Louis Garrel, the 43-year-old French actor, is currently reflecting on his two-decade career from a boat off the coast of Corsica. Despite a long-standing reputation as a cinematic heartthrob, Garrel admits that he is actively working to move past the vanity often associated with his profession. He notes that while he has spent over 20 years in the industry, he still battles a lingering desire to look beautiful on screen. However, he insists that he fights this urge because he recognizes that truly skilled actors prioritize the character over their own appearance, jokingly adding that he is perhaps not such a good actor himself.
Garrel’s career has been defined by his striking looks and intense screen presence. Since his 2003 breakout in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, where he played a student revolutionary, he has frequently been cast as a seductive, disruptive force. His filmography includes roles as a romantic lead in Xavier Dolan’s 2010 film Heartbeats, a suitor to Angelina Jolie in the drama Couture, and the dandy Jacques de Bascher in the 2014 Yves Saint Laurent biopic. His background is deeply rooted in cinema, coming from a family of filmmakers including his mother, Brigitte Sy, and his father, Philippe Garrel.
In his 62nd film, the comedy Just an Illusion, Garrel takes a departure from his usual roles by playing Yves, a middle-aged former executive struggling with unemployment and family life. The film, directed by Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, features a noticeably different aesthetic for the actor, who sports a bouffy hairstyle and a mustache reminiscent of Ron Burgundy, paired with a beige trenchcoat. The character is a far cry from his typical roles, depicting a man who feels increasingly out of place in his own home as his wife, played by Camille Cottin, advances in her career.
Garrel explains that he finds a new type of satisfaction in this performance. He notes that he now appreciates the moments in a screening room when he hears the audience laughing at him, rather than just admiring him. He recalls advice from a director early in his career who told him to act like a gorilla—intense and captivating, but without self-consciousness. By letting go of the need to look good, he believes he is able to deliver a more authentic performance.
The film, which arrives in UK and Irish cinemas on September 11, touches on significant social themes, including the history of the Crémieux Decree, Franco-German relations, and the rise of the Front National. Beyond the political backdrop, the story explores the dynamics of a long-term marriage. Garrel, who separated from his wife of eight years, actor and model Laetitia Casta, last year, finds the film’s portrayal of a couple staying together in the modern era to be a surprisingly radical, almost punk, concept.
Fatherhood is a central theme that Garrel explores through his role, reflecting his own life as a father to a five-year-old son with Casta and an 18-year-old adopted daughter, Oumy Bruni Garrel, from a previous relationship with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. While the film focuses on the relationship between his character and his 12-year-old son, Vincent, it also highlights the inevitable tension between generations. When asked about his own family legacy, Garrel admits that while he respects the classics, he finds inspiration in films outside the high-brow canon, such as Lethal Weapon, describing his own creative choices as a form of small rebellion against his family’s cinematic expectations. The report also notes that occasionally kicking up his bare legs, ruffling his curls and running the nail of his thumb over his moustache, the French film star is lying on his stomach. The report also notes that but I am pretty certain he is flirting with his own reflection, i think the person he sees on the laptop screen in front of him is me. The report also notes that the attraction between the Paris-born 43-year-old and the camera tends to be reciprocal. The report also notes that long of limb, tousled of hair and chiselled of nose, Garrel has spent a career on screen as French cinema’s favourite Adonis – the man film-makers turn to when they need an erotic wrecking ball to smash up bourgeois twosomes and turn them into quivering menages a trois. The report also notes that his breakout role in 2003 was as a priapic student revolutionary who inserts himself in the sexual bond between his twin sister (Eva Green) and a visiting American student (Michael Pitt) in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. The report also notes that since then, he’s been reliably effective as smouldering sexpots whose intense stare cuts across dancefloors – bewitching two friends in Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s 2010 film Heartbeats, enticing Angelina Jolie into a fling in high-fashion drama Couture, or hawkishly pouncing on the poor Yves Saint Laurent in the 2014 biopic Saint Laurent, where he played Karl Lagerfeld’s dandy companion Jacques de Bascher. The report also notes that that is false modesty of the highest order.
