That kind of premise is especially enticing to Seydoux. She met Harari, the Oscar-winning cowriter of 2023’s Anatomy of a Fall, years before shooting began, when he was still developing the story alongside the graphic novel the film is based on. “He just told me about this idea, and I was like, Okay, wow, this is really very original,” she says. “I like projects where I feel that they will be a challenge.”
Seydoux has three films making the festival rounds this season: The Unknown (set for release early next year), the Zellner brothers’ deadpan alien comedy Alpha Gang, and Marie Kreutzer’s psychological drama Gentle Monster (which will stream on Netflix in November). All three played at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, and when we meet one morning in Toronto, she’s clearly exhausted.
The projects may differ wildly in tone, but they circle some of the same questions. When we last spoke, around the release of Bertrand Bonello’s 2024 film The Beast, she was starring in another work in which identity, desire, and the borders of the self become slippery. “I’m drawn to stories that have a metaphysical dimension,” she observes.
Metaphysical, philosophical, resistant to easy definition: Seydoux seeks these qualities out not because she wants a movie to provide answers, but because she prefers that it not. “I like films where, as a viewer, I can come and make my own film in a way,” she says. “I don’t like films when the director tells you how to think. I don’t like to be manipulated as a viewer.” She pauses. “I need to feel that I have my own space.”
Her career has moved fluidly among French auteurs, blockbuster franchises, sci-fi, melodrama, romance, and the more unclassifiable reaches of international art cinema, all while eluding typecasting. Nor has she ever seemed inclined to trade on her much-photographed movie-star beauty, which is no less striking in person. “I’ve never been this kind of actress to play, like, ‘Hello, hi, welcome here,’” she says, chuckling at her own performance of uncomplicated geniality. “I’ve never played the girl next door.” (A poster for the 2024 rom-com French Girl, with Zach Braff and Vanessa Hudgens, watches over us from a wall in the production offices where we’re speaking.)
