“It’s like you’re playing in your little football club, in your little city, and suddenly somebody is, like, ‘Heyyyy, allez, viens jouer! ’ ” the French actress Camille Cottin was saying the other afternoon, at a Paris café. She was talking about getting the call to star opposite Matt Damon in “Stillwater,” a new film by Tom McCarthy, in which she plays Virginie, a free-spirited single mother who ends up sharing her apartment with Bill, a taciturn roughneck from Oklahoma. The movie is set in Marseille. Bill’s daughter is in prison, having been convicted of murder during a student-exchange program, and he is trying to exonerate her, despite a minimal command of French and of his emotions. Cottin and Damon met for the first time during rehearsals. “It was funny, because the first scene I’m, like, ‘Blurbluhblurbluhblurrrrhl,’ I’m a chatterbox,” Cottin recalled. “And he only says, ‘Yeah, man.’ And the way he said, ‘Yeah, man,’ I was, like, ‘Wowwwwww, there’s so much there.’ And I was, like, ‘Why do I have all the text? He’s fucking Matt Damon!’ ”
In France, after years of work in the theatre, Cottin became famous for “Connasse” (“Asshole,” approximately), a “Borat”-style series in which she played a magisterially self-involved Parisienne whose exploits—like causing a traffic jam on her bicycle as she reapplies her lipstick in a car’s side mirror—were captured on candid camera. In America, she’s best known as Hélène on “Killing Eve,” and, especially, as Andréa Martel, the hard-charging but bighearted boss woman on “Call My Agent!” At the café, she was wearing white sneakers, jeans, and a gray sweater, and had an air of modesty that camouflaged her celebrity as effectively as any baseball cap. “It’s funny with this job,” she said, occasionally braiding a handful of hair as she spoke. “You start from zero all the time, right? New characters, new partner, new story, new director. I always feel completely like a beginner.”
Cottin spoke with a light British accent, a legacy of living in London as a teen-ager. After high school, she studied American and English literature at the Sorbonne; her thesis was on “Harry Potter.” She also taught English to teen-agers. “I was terrible,” she said. “I had all the seventeen-year-olds who were completely high on pot, so no one would ever answer any of my questions. It was like forty red-eyed rabbits just staring at me.” She added, “I didn’t want to say if I didn’t know something, because I would lose my credibility, so I started inventing words. One day, a girl says, ‘How do we say chirurgie esthétique?’ ” Cottin was stumped. “So I go, ‘Surgical aestheticism.’ ” She went home and looked it up in the dictionary, and the next day said to the student, “What I told you is the American way, but the English way is ‘plastic surgery.’ ”
One of the attractions of “Stillwater,” in addition to a tightly wound plot and a dazzling backdrop, is its transposition of some obvious American political dilemmas to a foreign setting. Bill in Marseille is a more vulnerable character than Bill in Stillwater. “I think the movie is about opening up to each other,” Cottin said. “It was rewritten under Trump,” and it reflects the fact that “there’s two Americas which are completely split.”
She poured tea from a pot, and the conversation turned to the #MeToo movement in France. At last year’s Césars—France’s Academy Awards—Adèle Haenel walked out of the room when Roman Polanski received an award, yelling, “Bravo, le pédophile! ” Cottin said, “I was watching at a friend’s house, and I was, like, ‘This is so punk.’ I love that she didn’t care. I think it’s something to defy codes and to let the organic anger erupt.” Cottin’s fledgling production company, founded with her friend Shirley Kohn, is named Malmö, in tribute to Kohn’s Swedish heritage and the Swedish emphasis on gender equality.
At the café, the tea was drunk and the bill was paid, and Cottin headed back to her apartment, in the Ninth Arrondissement, on foot. As she walked, Cottin chatted about neighborhood banalities. She stopped in a little shopping street. “Have you had the Brillat-Savarin with truffles?” she said, steering her companion into a cheesemonger’s. The cheesemonger said, “Bonjour.” Cottin, the anti-connasse, replied in kind, asking after the cheesemonger’s family. There was no camera in sight, candid or otherwise. ♦
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