For Adèle Exarchopoulos, her first taste of film stardom was the literal taste of Toblerone. Then 13 years old, the young Parisian had just been cast in her first film, Jane Birkin’s autobiographical directing debut Boxes, and was invited round to the icon’s home. “I went to the bathroom to wash my hands,” Exarchopoulos recalls. “And I saw for the first time in my life a claw-foot tub. With a bowl of mini Toblerones next to it. And I was like: ‘Why are you eating chocolate when you’re taking a bath? This is so cool.’ And Jane said: ‘You want to sleep over? You can take a bath and eat some chocolate.’”
She beams at the memory. We’re talking, via Zoom, days after Birkin died aged 76; Exarchopoulos remembers her fondly as “the first person who gave me a chance – really benevolent, kind and loving”. They’d seen each other again over the years, but the close-quarters shoot is what sticks in her mind: “Cinema is about living really intense stuff with people, for a certain period of time, and afterwards you all go back to your daily lives. It’s like a mini death after, suddenly no longer sharing that intimacy, but you have this kind of forever tenderness for those people. Film shoots are like little summer love stories.”
Now 29, Exarchopoulos has cycled through many such love stories, and doesn’t feel them any less deeply each time. At 19, she broke out with a stunning performance in Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, playing a schoolgirl plunged into a volatile lesbian relationship with an older art student. In a first for the Cannes film festival, she and co-star Léa Seydoux shared the Palme d’Or with their director, while Exarchopoulos also won a César for most promising actress.
Her latest is an emotionally acute triangle: Ira Sachs’s exquisite hothouse relationship drama Passages, in which she plays Agathe, a schoolteacher who comes between polysexual film-maker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and his long-term partner Martin (Ben Whishaw). True to form for the American writer-director, it’s a film of raw feeling and physical intimacy: Exarchopoulos and Rogowski’s onscreen affair plays out through rough-and-tumble dialogue and candid sex scenes. (The film fell foul of prudish US censors, who slapped it with a commercially restrictive NC-17 certificate; distributor Mubi opted to release it unrated instead.)
Exarchopoulos sees nothing provocative about the film, which to her portrays a very relatable form of desire. “We all go through this kind of sensual attraction where you meet someone and you already know that you will have sex with this person, which is a really strange feeling,” she says. “Maybe it won’t be so good. Maybe you will be disappointed. But you know it will happen. And that’s exciting.”
Her love scenes with Rogowski are the most explicit she’s shot since her graphic, extended sex scenes with Seydoux in Blue Is the Warmest Colour. Those scenes, using prosthetic genitalia but no body doubles, attracted much controversy, with Kechiche accused of exploiting his young stars. Exarchopoulos was determined that Passages be a very different experience.
“I told Ira I have no trouble [with] a sex scene, but I don’t want people to see my body like they did before, so can we find another way,” she says. “Ira wasn’t primarily interested in seeing my boobs and my body; it was more about capturing two people from different cultures not being able to put words on all of their desire. We agreed not to treat the scene like a boy discovering love with a girl: it was more about two people trying to search each other, a kind of mutual seduction. And I think there is something really physical between Franz and me, but it was also clear between us what the limits were.”
Not that she was altogether blindsided on Kechiche’s film, she says; she was more unnerved by the process of unveiling the film to the world, and unprepared for the commentary it generated. “With more maturity, I now know that it was a very hard experience in the sense of the commitment that we were being asked in some of the scenes,” she says. “And it’s true that probably the controversy spoiled the project and the beauty of it, because we were making something that really belonged to us in the first place.”
For all her conflicted memories regarding the film, it’s still dear to her. “I have a lot of love for Kechiche,” she says. “And it was one of those shoots where I came out of it telling myself, OK, I couldn’t have been better. Which is really, really rare when you are an actor. It was like shooting life in a way, like you’re making a documentary about your own character.”
Ten years on, she’s a more confident actor – but at the same time, she says, a more modest one since becoming a mother: her son Ismael, from a former relationship with French rapper Mamadou Coulibaly (AKA Doums), was born in 2017. “I was more unselfconscious before becoming a mother, I felt more free,” she says. “Now that I’m a mum, I think I’m not more shy, but I see intimacy as something sacred to offer – to a character, or to someone in life.”
Passages is one of relatively few English-language films Exarchopoulos has made since rising to fame – another, Sean Penn’s critically lambasted political drama The Last Face, served her less well – and she doesn’t especially crave the Hollywood blockbuster realm that Seydoux has cracked.
“After Blue Is the Warmest Colour, I got an American agent and she told me: ‘OK, you have to come to LA and have meetings,’” she remembers. “So I went to Paramount, Sony, Spielberg, everywhere. And all of them told me we will work together one day. After the first meeting, I call my dad and tell him: ‘I’m going to work with Paramount!’ And two hours later I go to Sony and they tell me the same thing. And I call my dad again, and I’m like: ‘OK, I’ll never work here.’” She laughs. “It’s interesting. You just have to learn.”
Growing up in Paris’s 19th arrondissement, the daughter of a nurse and a multi-jobbing guitar teacher, Exarchopoulos didn’t have stars in her eyes, and got into acting, she says, by chance: “I didn’t know anything about theatre. My father loved to watch movies on DVD, but that’s all. My parents were like, you can pick one activity: I tried guitar but it didn’t work out. I tried sport but I was too lazy. And then there was an improvisation class, and I really enjoyed it. For me it was just a playground where I could be a vegetable or I could be Marie Antoinette. And then one day a casting director came and said: ‘Does someone want to do an audition?’ And I thought why not? And I was told if I got the average grade at school, I could do shoots. So I got good at cheating and I could do what I like.”
Even after the success of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, the teenager didn’t see acting as much more than a lark. “Honestly, it wasn’t until I was a mother that I told myself, OK, this is a job,” she says. “Before then, I would call my father and tell him: ‘Papa, they’re paying me to eat candies and play pinball.’ Now it’s not the same system in my head, but I always try to keep that pleasure and innocence.”
The joys of inhabiting other people, she continues, have yet to grow stale: “Making movies is for people who get bored really quickly: it’s different each time, you have to take risks, you have to cross characters with really different morals from yours and find empathy for them anyway, even if you hate some part of them. That makes me really feel rich inside.”
And on the hardest days – say, after shooting an intensive sex scene – how does she decompress? “In the French way,” she says drolly. “You make a joke and smoke a cigarette.”
Passages is released in cinemas in UK and Ireland on 1 September
