An effortless study in Gallic cool, Vincent Cassel has played characters both rakish and romantic, elegant leads mixed with a healthy share of the magnetically perverse. Whether it’s a skinhead hooligan, a paunchy murdering gangster or a laser-dancing jewel thief, the French actor performs his transitions without seams.
Moments into “Black Swan,” Darren Aronofsky’s new psychological thriller set around a New York City ballet company, the actor descends a staircase and you get the brief: His character is disciplined, dangerous and obviously a dancer. Such is the pinpoint physicality of Cassel. “He was wonderful to work with, partly because he moves so beautifully,” says the director.
Cassel, 44, is more matter-of-fact: “I started dancing seriously about eight years ago, as a complement to acting. I’ve just always thought that actors should know how to move,” he says.
He plays the company’s brutish artistic director in the film, alongside prima ballerina Natalie Portman, and it is a dark and fractured stage Aronofsky has structured around them. There are pirouettes and sequined tutus (Rodarte designed the ballet costumes), but there are also bleeding toes and a warren of concrete hallways and bunkerlike rehearsal rooms to add to the gothic suspense, before the film launches into the unlikely genre of “ballet horror.”
“There is an aspect of the movie that is a bit Polanski, but then you have some sci-fi, a Verhoeven kind of horror movie on the side,” the actor says.
Belying a cultured upbringing in Paris’s Montmartre neighborhood, it was Cassel’s 1995 breakout role as a Jewish hoodlum from the outskirts of Paris in “La Haine” (“Hate”) that set him on a course of playing complex, disenfranchised characters during the first half of his career. “When I was starting out as an actor in Paris, say 17, everything was set to go a particular way.
My father [the late Jean-Pierre Cassel, a player of debonair bourgeois types] was an actor, and I was on a path to become something of a jeune premier, like a romantic leading man. Then I met guys who kind of felt like me, who were my age, and at the time we were in opposition to the French film industry, and we started to make these movies—violent, dark movies. I didn’t plan it, but it carved my identity as an actor,” Cassel says.
Emerging as the poster boy of France’s guerrilla-filmmaking generation never hobbled Cassel, whose versatility led to star turns in romantic dramas “L’Appartement” (where he met his future wife, Italian actress Monica Bellucci) and “Sur Mes Lèvres” (“Read My Lips”), along with English-language films “Elizabeth,” “Ocean’s Twelve” (his scene-stealing laser-field dance a result of talents in capoeira) and “Eastern Promises.”
Despite his checkered cross-continental film resume, Cassel is famed for being partial to only the more challenging roles. “I don’t shoot that much. I’m very choosy. I always say no first, and then I say yes if I can’t say no anymore,” he says.
A project the actor was determined to be a part of was the film biography of Jacques Mesrine, a notorious French gangster of the ’60s and ’70s who was executed by police on the streets of Paris. A bloody two-part epic, the recently released films “Mesrine: Killer Instinct” and “Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1” took seven years to get made and required Cassel to gain 40 pounds to play the title character, a mesmerizing performance for which he won the best-actor César.
Despite their status as one of France’s most beautiful acting couples, Cassel and Bellucci could hardly be considered a celebrity pairing—it is not widely known to U.S. audiences that they are married, despite their 11-year union and having been co-stars in nine films.
“The professional situation takes so much time in this business, when you can share it with people you love, it’s a plus—the communication is much quicker, you can have the kids around [Bellucci, 46, gave birth to their second daughter six months ago]. It’s a beautiful way to work,” he says.
With homes in Paris, London, Rome and Rio, Cassel is accustomed to a nomadic existence, but enjoyed returning to the streets of his hometown to shoot WSJ.’s winter fashion story (“Agents Provocateurs”)—despite negotiating thunderstorms, demonstrations and terrorism threats.
“Paris is a pretty aggressive city. It’s not just about strikes and protests,” Cassel says. “In America, people have a tendency to pretend that everything is fine—there’s a politeness. In Europe, some people behave politely, but most people don’t. They’re combative, they fight. When I come back to it I hate it, but then I miss it when I’m not here. I guess that means that Paris is really my home.”