The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I’ve learnt how to be both a lover and a mother’
silent movie star of our time.
It’s Only the End of the World, which gets a UK release next week, is something for fans of that face to look forward to – an insatiable, tartly comic psychodrama, costarring Cotillard, about a highstakes family reunion shot largely in intimate close-up. It’s directed by the revoltingly young/prolific Canadian auteur Xavier Dolan (he’s 27 years old, this is somehow his sixth film) and was shot in 20 breakneck days; Cotillard and her fellow French cast members – Léa Seydoux, Vincent Cassel, Nathalie Baye and Gaspard Ulliel – were together for only six. Cotillard plays Catherine, the timorous sister-in-law of Ulliel’s young writer, who has one last chance to bid farewell to his relations, thanks to a ticking terminal illness. The film won the Grand Prix at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it also caused a good old-fashioned critical crisis. Reviews, like its characters’ blustery moods, were all over the shop.
Today, chatting in the early evening over restorative macarons, Cotillard is on a contrastingly even keel, despite being “super tired” by her own admission. She is, after all, eight months pregnant with her second child with Canet, and the smallish, hardish hotel chair on which she continually repositions herself looks about as comfortable as an upturned garden fork. Her five-year-old son Marcel is playing next door with his father. Before the interview, she affectionately ruffles his gold-white hair – Marcel, that is, not Canet – and plants a flurry of kisses on his cheek.
The last two years have been a six-film marathon for Cotillard – beginning with It’s Only the End of the World, which she shot back in May 2015. After the birth, she says she plans to “at least for a few months, stay away from a movie set,” before adding: “A few months might become a year.”
But she hasn’t been deliberately trying to pack in as many roles as possible before the birth. “It just happened that way,” she says in quiet, considered English. “A lot of propositions were irresistible. And technically I could do everything, so I decided to have this experience, which was kind of crazy.”
That meant much time spent apart from Canet and Marcel, though she worked out along the way “how to keep this connection with my family and especially my son and my – my man”, she smiles, eventually landing on the English mot juste. ( The two have been a couple for 10 years, but first met as co-stars in the 2003 romance Love Me If You Dare.) “I’ve learnt how to balance my life as a lover and a mother – with all those other lives I had to bring to life in my work.”
Last September, that careful equilibrium was momentarily sent reeling. Cotillard was caught in the splashback from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s divorce: she and Pitt played lovers while filming Robert Zemeckis’s duplicitous spy romance Allied over the summer and gossip sites wrongly equated fact with fiction. (Cotillard and Canet both posted sturdy rebuttals to rumours of an affair on the social network Instagram).
Did she immediately realise people would make that assumption? “No, I didn’t,” she says. “But I only found out he was getting divorced when I was already getting dragged into the story. Everything happened at the same time. Like, they announced they got divorced, and” – her eyes narrowing – “immediately people started to try to find out why.”
After being blamed for the end of Brangelina, Marion Cotillard is putting family before film
One upshot, film-wise, was panic at Paramount, as the studio scrambled to work out how to promote a turbulent love story during the very public end of its leading man’s marriage.
With crisp dismay, Cotillard describes the PR meltdown as having “ruined the release of the movie completely”. “I loved that movie,” she sighs. “I think it’s a beautiful story. But we didn’t do anything in the press at all in the US. No magazines, no TV, nothing.
“It’s a love story, and we should