Vincent Cassel sobs. Is he acting now?

What one would perhaps normally do if, provoked by a terrible childhood memory, the person in front of you begins suddenly to weep, is to extend a comforting arm. But this is an interview and the correct etiquette, as far as my own behaviour is concerned, is unclear. Outside the door, film industry personnel are lurking. I am worried that, should they enter at this delicate juncture, they will assume that I have been the cause of the tears that Vincent Cassel is now shedding so copiously into a cloth napkin.
We are supposed to be talking about cinema. But the conversation has strayed, perhaps catastrophically, in the direction of his childhood, and I had hoped, when I first caught sight of them, that I’d hallucinated the suddenly water-logged eyes. I’d hoped, further, that the first tear, when it came, had been allowed to meander down those bony features for effect (minutes earlier, he had told me that the image he projects of himself to the public is a “scam”). But now the eyes are shot with red. The cheeks are wet. The breath is a battery of stuttered gasps and wheezes. My immediate reaction is to panic. “Would you like a glass of water,” I say, aghast, as my favourite actor in the world begins, properly, to sob.

Well, not exclusively sob, because – in between deep intakes of breath – he is speaking, or trying to speak. “You know… I’m sorry. Actually, I am not sorry! I’m not sorry because it’s part of the job really. This is – aaaagh,” he groans. “This is actually… very interesting.” He smiles in that brave way people do just before they’re about to start crying again. “I’m going to pour you a glass of water,” I say, idiotically. He is an actor, I remind myself, as he stares up at the ceiling to keep in the tears. Is he acting now?

“Aaaaaagh,” moans Vincent Cassel. “Wooooooh. Feels really good, actually.” And then, after a pause, “Would you like some water, too?” He pours me a glass. “You didn’t expect that one, ah?” he chuckles. “Non!” he exclaims. “You have to understand something. I don’t care really. I don’t care. This is what I do. I play with these kinds of things. So you can kill somebody in a movie and then you can cry about things in your childhood. Which is fine. But, yes. The reason I am emotional about this – whoooh [the sound of a gigantic exhalation] – is because…” His voice is travelling up the octaves now at dangerous pace, then cracks: “It’s true.”

One hour previously. A room at the end of a lavish hotel carpet is flanked on both sides by PR girls with clipboards, the usual custodians of very famous film stars. We are in Le Grand hotel, just north of Opéra. Behind the door sits Vincent Cassel, 45, whom so many women would love to prise away from his wife, Monica Bellucci, and so many men would, simply, love to be. Indeed, there are articles in men’s magazines instructing its readers “How to Be Vincent Cassel”. The key to this art is fivefold, according to one account I read: “Be the bad boy; limit your availability; project passion; be true to yourself; know how to dance.” It’s a prescription that Cassel will not entirely disagree with, when, later, I put to him the notion of hundreds of Cassel copycats around the globe dancing their way, as unavailably as possible, into their own babe-studded futures (the point of being as much like him as possible is that women will find you irresistible).
He turns down 95 per cent of the work that is sent his way, after all, for fear of boredom, of making meaningless films, of not spending enough time with his daughters (Deva, 7, and Léonie, 23 months). “I always say no, at first. I say no until I can’t say no any more.” Pivotally, he said yes, though, to a YSL campaign, allowing him to do fewer and weirder films. (Is Monica the kind of woman who could adapt to a life eked out from the profits of art-house projects? One thinks not.)

In Brazil, a country in whose language he is proficient and where Cassel intends to relocate permanently this year, he will star in what he refers to as a “Samba drama” directed by a friend he much admires, Kim Chapiron. Their last collaboration was Sheitan in 2006, a parodic horror film in which Cassel plays a demonic shepherd. It was panned by most critics. Of his more critically acclaimed films, Read My Lips (2001) for example, in which he plays an ex-con, he can be dismissive. “It’s not a rebellion against anything,” is his gripe. Of The Monk, his latest film, he says: “I’m a little more anti-clerical than the movie.” Cassel plays a Capuchin friar gone bad. “Maybe because I spent a few years in a Catholic boarding school… A man, 40 years old, who’s spent his whole life surrounded by crucifixes. I totally understand that character.”

The man Vincent Cassel is perceived to be by the general public is often identical to the parts he chooses to play: flawed hardmen, for the most part, battling against the odds, or prison, or themselves. The jutting lower lip he so often employs on screen implies the kind of brooding, aggressive, even foolish stubbornness one often sees outside pubs or nightclubs; the snarl – denoting anything from arrogance to a man uncomfortably out of his depth – speaks to men, who relate to the portraits he specialises in, of “weaknesses”, as he calls them, “of the male kind” (violence, in particular). Watching him on screen, another thought occurs (to women, at least): damn, the man is attractive.

The actual Vincent Cassel, when I meet him, has the vaguest trace of a bouffant. The suit is smart-casual, the legs crossed ankle to knee; the manner is open, very French. Of the arsenal of four languages he speaks virtually perfectly, he has selected a pleasantly French-accented English. He laughs often, has a light, almost sporty air (he likes the Brazilian martial art capoeira and surfing), but favours serious conversation, bordering on the dark. “I am very impulsive. And I am very… I don’t know if it’s angry or nervous but… I’m sensitive. Sometimes I react faster than I wish. I wish I could think a little more. But I’m the kind of person who needs to do things to understand. I don’t understand things before I do them. That’s why I’m an actor… maybe.” He says that whatever he’s feeling – good or bad – he needs to express it, but is quick to forgive and forget. Bellucci seems to have been the salve on his deeper wounds: “She has given me love.” As a very French afterthought, he adds, “To be angry, what does it mean?”

I can’t say for sure why Vincent Cassel was reduced to tears during our interview, but I suspect it has something to do with his eldest daughter’s turning 7 – his age when he embarked, unwillingly, on the most character-forming event of his life. The interview had gone swimmingly for three quarters of an hour but the strands of our conversation seemed not to connect. We had covered the mind-altering drugs he persuaded his father to take with him not long ago in Central America; meeting his wife on the set of 1996’s L’Appartement; and his belief that Gaspar Noé, the director of 2002’s controversial Irréversible (with its ten-minute rape scene), in which Bellucci and Cassel starred, is another Fellini.

Cassel is telling me how carefully he crafts his public image. He won’t tell me who he really is, “because you’re a journalist and you’re going to write about it. If I tell you only the truth, I’m working against my own thing.” Soon afterwards we’re talking about boarding school, where he was a very bad student with a good imagination. “I was always rebelling because I could really never understand why my parents would send me away for so long.” Why did they? “My father was an actor [Jean-Pierre Cassel] and my mother [Sabine Litique, a food writer for Elle] was too young, maybe, to have kids. When you have kids too young, you don’t really realise you have to take care of them.”

I had always assumed, because he’s never talked about it before, that he’d become a boarder in his teens. But he says flatly, he started, “much younger”. How old was he? “Seven”, he says – and the tears begin to flow. There follows the scene described above; more tears, then some talk about the merits of therapy: he spent some time in psychoanalysis but never wanted to cure himself “because I’m using it [in his acting]. The day I’m cured, what am I going to do?” He concludes that his tears “will give you a different insight into everything I said before but it’s – how can I say that... Yeah – we talked about anger, we talked about running away to different countries, we talked about not trusting anything. The thing is you never really cure yourself of your childhood.”

When not at boarding school or in New York with his mother, he lived in Paris with his father, running with a crowd conspicuously less well off than he was. It made him conscious “that this was all wrong, the way we treated Africa and the colonies and the Algerian history with France. This is all wrong. It is still a lie and it still works like that.” He credits his younger brother, Mathias Crochon, a rap artist and “crazy guy” (Cassel’s words), for having opened his mind to what he now sees as the inescapable truths about the world, and his mother for having introduced him to New York. She moved there after divorcing his father, and Vincent might have made it his home in his twenties, had it not been for America’s God-botherers and group-think, both of which he feels far too French to identify with: “No! There’s no God for me.”

As an adolescent, he was compelled to lie often. “That was my only way to express that part of me,” he says. What would he lie about? “To get girls, I would pretend I was Brazilian. And that was wonderful because I could be relaxed and charming and tactile. And I didn’t have to say much.” Weren’t these girls upset when they found out that their new paramour was boring old French? “Most of the time, if you lie to someone for that long, their reaction is they’re very angry. But then, if they’re not stupid, they realise if you were able to make them believe this to that point and finally you tell the truth, they might think you’re not that bad and that person might have fun with you.” They might believe you’re insane. “No. Insane would have been to lie until the next day.”

Another form of lying would involve going to his local boulangerie in character, and the next day turning up as himself. Who would he pretend to be – another Brazilian? No. Cassel shrugs: “Some psycho from the neighbourhood.” Why? “I was training, I guess.”

The conversation turns to summer, always a magical time in his recollection, much of it spent, through the Seventies and early Eighties, in his grandfather’s casino in Arcachon, southwest France. Casino de la Plage, housed in the Château Deganne and built in the 1850s, looks like a Disney-inspired cake.

“It was a casino and two clubs and a theatre and they would play everything all summer. We would live in the make-up room. And so each one of us kids – my brother, my cousins, myself – would each have une loge [a dressing room], en effet, with a mirror, light bulbs, a sink, a bed. At the end of the corridor there was a metal fire door. We had a special key and you would open it and you would be in the theatre.”

Italian comedies, B-movies and porn were all shown in the cinema, as well as foreign films dubbed into French – the first time he saw Taxi Driver was at his grandfather’s. Ex-convicts, covertly gay members of the Russian mafia and men on the run are the leads he normally chooses, and Travis Bickle seems to sit at the heart of most of his good performances. People assume he deliberately plays bad boys, but he denies this. “Everybody is troubled, really, and nobody is really good.”

He is escaping to Brazil because he is, in part, turning his back on his own upbringing, and the Old World in general, which he finds impossibly weighed down by tradition. “I think there is a cynicism in Europe that’s stopping people, that restricts us from trying new things, from being naive again, in a way.”

Key to his decision to emigrate are his two children, whom he intends to teach the reality of the world as he sees it. “I really believe I am angry with the world because I smell the perpetual bulls*** around us. And I don’t trust anything. I don’t believe in politics; I don’t think that there is a Right and a Left. I don’t believe in religions. I don’t believe in the economic system we
live by. I don’t trust the world I live in. I don’t trust my environment. I don’t want to sound too negative, but I hope that one day it will be exposed for something else.” He says the level of his distrust makes him sad: “Everything is all about money. And when you really understand that, you can’t really trust anything. I’m not being too frontal with my kids with that yet, but that’s what I’m going to tell them.”

Lack of confidence, no less, makes it difficult to trust anyone, although his wife earned that privilege many years ago. It’s possibly Bellucci who opened his eyes to the idea that “the only way for a man to have salvation is to recognise the feminine part in himself”.

The tears have by now dried, but he still sounds fragile. And yet, for all his rage against the world, he is one of the most pleasant, and definitely the happiest-seeming, cynic I have ever met – perhaps because he is about to forsake Europe for Rio. “I just realised I want to enjoy my life as much as I can and I want my kids to grow up in an environment that is not… this. Really. I’m fed up of pollution and angry people.” Hah! Besides filming and surfing and hanging out with his family, in Brazil he aims to complete one of his most important life tasks, unlearning the dubious lessons of his childhood. “The hard work, really, is to get rid of what you have been taught. And I guess, slowly but surely, I’m getting closer and closer to that.”