Vincent cassell plays the animal caged within us all

Vincent Cassel exudes the kind of firecracker energy and unpredictability that draws the viewer inexorably in.

Vincent Cassel in a scene from It’s Only the End of the World.

Vincent Cassel is wired. On and off screen, he exudes the kind of firecracker energy and unpredictability that draws the viewer ­inexorably in, making gawpers of us all. The 50-year-old has built a ­career on playing charismatic wildcards who might at any minute just lose it.

He has cultivated and carried this persona through such art-house provocations as Dobermann and Irreversible (a film featuring scenes of near-inconceivable brutality, many featuring his ex-wife Monica Bellucci), mainstream Hollywood blockbusters such as the Ocean’s franchise and the recent Jason Bourne, and serious award-winning dramas, including Black Swan and A Dangerous Method (in which his character’s motto is: “never ­repress anything”).

In his latest movie, the French-language melodrama It’s Only the End of the World, he delivers high-grade Cassel, playing Antoine, a bullying, under­educated carpenter who reacts to the return of his long-lost brother Louis (Gaspard Ulliel) with barely suppressed rage, some off-kilter humour and a harrowing third-act rant.

It’s a mesmerising turn, bolstered by equally strong performances from his co-stars Lea Seydoux (as his sister) and Marion Cotillard (his wife). When I ask Cassel why he continues to return to this type of pressure-cooker character, he begins by saying: “I guess there is something in me that’s like that. My energy has something to do with it. People call me for these types of roles, but it’s my fault because it’s something I’ve always been attracted to.”

He stops himself and adds, mischievously: “I have this view, maybe it’s a bit extreme ...”

He then proceeds to elaborate his belief that the outre roles he plays provide a cathartic function for audiences who are only partially detached from their animalistic nature by society’s rules. “Because society is very hard to live in,” he says. “We have to ­behave because otherwise we would pee on the floor, and we would f..k everybody, and we would say everything we want to say all the time.

“But we can’t. So somehow seeing people on screen express these things is good for us.”

We are sitting out on the heated veranda of a hip but empty boutique hotel in the east of Paris. He is wearing jeans, trainers and sweatshirt, looking at least a decade younger than 50 (he eats well, lives in Rio de Janeiro with his new 27-year-old Italian girlfriend Tina Kunakey, and he surfs a lot). His hair is cut tight. He is sipping a cafe creme. He’s just impossibly, enviably, at ease with himself.

In conversation (he speaks French, English, Italian and Portuguese), nothing is off limits. He is not concerned with protecting his image, or his career, or his reputation. He just talks, sips, shrugs, reminds me that he doesn’t give a f..k, and talks some more. On parenting, he says: “I ­really believe that if children feel able to say ‘f..k you’ to their parents then they will be able to say that to society at large, and this is a good thing.” And on acting, he says: “People who want you to believe that acting is hard and acting is ­important? It’s bullshit. Acting is easy. Trust me.”

For now, though, he continues on the animalistic vein, and on the service that his wilder roles perform for his audiences. In one of his recent movies, 2015’s searing relationship drama Mon Roi, for instance, he plays a womanising restaurateur, Georgio, who keeps deserting his wife (and the mother of his child) for a mentally unstable but very sexy ex-girlfriend.

His character was criticised as chauvinistic at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, but Cassel defended him, and still defends him today. “I heard people saying that he was a sadist or a manipulator,” says ­Cassel. “I don’t agree. He’s just a man. Men are like that. The truth is that men, at a certain point, can f..k a lot more people than they should.” I gingerly intervene. They “can”? “They might. They would. And if they don’t it’s only because they are really controlling themselves. And if you say that it’s not like that I think you’re lying.”

As for the Cannes backlash: “In Cannes I fought not for mankind but for the male kind. Yes it’s tough to be a woman today, but it’s tough to be a man too. Now we have women with balls. (He puts on a camp voice) ‘Oh, she has balls!’ It’s a compliment to say that women have balls. From my point of view? No.”

He continues to talk about gender stereotyping. “The wonderful aspect to all this is that suddenly there is a chance for men to feminise ourselves. I really think that the salvation of man goes through a recognition of our feminine sensibility. Now there’s this ability for men to be closer to their kids without being considered a sissy.”

Cassel has two daughters, Deva, 12, and Leonie, 6, from his marriage with Bellucci. They go to school in Paris, but he tries to see them as often as possible.

The talk of family brings us back to It’s Only the End of the World, with its bonkers story of scrapping siblings and an embittered mother (played by Nathalie Baye). The film is directed by ­Xavier Dolan (who made Mommy) from a play by Jean-Luc Lagarce and turns on a single afternoon where the returning, successful son must tell his resentful family that he’s dying.

It’s a film of relentless verbal battles and sometimes outright ­assaults, mostly involving Cassel’s character, Antoine, but it climaxes early with a poignant exchange of looks between Antoine and Louis. The pair are in the family kitchen, watching as their mother and their sister perform cringe-making aerobics moves to the blaring O-Zone dance track Dragostea Din Tei (aka The Numa Numa Song). They catch each other’s eyes, brother to brother, apparent deadly enemies, and suddenly, and briefly, they both melt.

When I mention the scene to Cassel his eyes instantly fill with tears. “I think the power of that scene comes from childhood,” he says. “I think childhood ...” He pauses, looking for the right words. “I think it makes you cry.”

Cassel describes his childhood as a Freudian parable. His father, actor Jean-Pierre Cassel (aka “the French Fred Astaire”), sent Vincent to boarding school in Normandy when he was 11, providing him with a lifelong source of ­resentment, anger and rejection issues. “The most terrible thing about boarding school is that you don’t understand why your parents aren’t taking care of you. The most terrible thing is the feeling of abandonment.”

On the positive side, it taught him how to act. By the age of 12, after three attempts at running away, he pretended to have a nervous breakdown. He was sent to the infirmary, where a close friend came to visit. “I wanted to tell him the truth, but when he got close I could see that he was scared,” he says. “And I thought, ‘F..k! Now I’m alone with my lie.’ But I also realised if I can make everyone around me believe something that I’ve totally invented, then doing it on camera can’t be that difficult.”

An actor was born. Cassel studied acting in his teenage years, joined the Fratellini Circus School in Paris at 17 and, after breaking out as the cop-hating skinhead in Mathieu Kassovitz’s landmark 1995 crime film La Haine, decided he would exact revenge upon his father, and his father’s actorly generation, by working only with young, anti-establishment directors in films such as Dobermann, Brotherhood of the Wolf and the gory horror Sheitan.

“I didn’t want to have anything to do with my father’s generation,” he says. “I went for young directors and made young movies to ­inspire the people my age. I did this for a long time and then something happened. In 2007 I was about to make my first movie with my father, on Mesrine, and he died. And when the movie came out and I saw myself on screen I couldn’t believe how much I looked like him. Something clicked. I thought: ‘Forget it. Let’s not fight any more.’ And this is how it happens. You lose your parents and suddenly you accept them.”

These days Cassel is a happy beast. On screen he bounces between big Hollywood movies and smaller intimate French films — he’s next appearing in the title role of the French artist in the biopic Gauguin. Off screen, he says, he’s surrounded by women, who are teaching him about love. “It’s through love that you learn the most,” he says. “And I learn a lot through women. The love of my daughters, the love of my ex-wife and the love of my actual lover.”

It’s notable here that when I refer to Kunakey as his “girlfriend” he replies by describing her as his “lover”, which is fabulous, and French. He says that having a 27-year-old lover keeps him young and makes him constantly evaluate how he sees the world. “I’m not always right just because I’m older than her,” he says.

“The things I’ve experienced aren’t necessarily applicable to the next generation. So I’m trying to learn, and to make her understand things too, and hopefully we’ll meet somewhere in the middle.”

The Times

* It’s Only the End of the World will be screening at the upcoming Alliance Française French Film Festival in Australia from March.