Vincent Cassel: “Real spies are not James Bond alpha males”

When he doesn’t wonderfully illustrate the concept of male fragility with a controversial statement to the “Guardian”, Vincent Cassel embodies in his own way the alpha male of French cinema. That is to say, an actor capable of doing everything and better than most of his contemporaries. He excels in particular in the physical game (the “Liaison” series is new proof of this), the second degree (see his Caesar in the last Asterix), in the incarnation of bastards (we have rarely seen a narcissistic pervert as credible as in “Mon roi” by Maïwenn), humanity without artifice (“Out of the ordinary” by Nakache and Toledano), in export to the Anglo-Saxons with Cronenberg, Aronofsky or Soderbergh, in historical characters too (the biopics of Paul Gauguin and Mesrine) while remaining credible in turnips (“Sa Majesté Minor”).

Above all, he is one of the rare actors who, when you meet him in a palace during his promotion, gives off something indefinable: a nervousness in the way he moves, a tension in his eyes, an obvious charisma. And if, observing him, one cannot help thinking of him as a possible incarnation of James Bond, he does not practice the Hollywood language of wood, he says and does what he wants to the point of reprimanding the unfortunate press officer having made the mistake of scratching the first name of the journalist who came to interview him. It is therefore easy to understand why the Apple TV + platform went to get it for inca