Vincent Cassel
Vincent Cassel
Vincent Casselis a French actor best known to English-speaking audiences through his film performances in Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen, as well as Black Swan. Cassel is also renowned for playing the infamous French bank-robber and folk hero Jacques Mesrine in Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth23 November 1966
CityParis, France
CountryFrance
I feel like the so-called bad guys are never totally bad. I guess it's the closest thing I can do to reality: people act nice but nobody really is nice. We all have to balance that with something dark.
Working with David Cronenberg or Darren Aronofsky or even Steven Soderbergh isn't really like a typical Hollywood movie. These are true artists, and have a certain amount of freedom when they work, and they're more like independent filmmakers making their way through big studios.
When eventually I started to act a bit more, I realised that circus school had taught me something that a lot of actors my age didn't have: physicality. They didn't know how to move. Acting is not all about talking. There is something animalistic about it.
I don't think France is a racist country, I really don't, but we do still have many problems with our immigrant past, and there's a shame that goes with that, that works both ways, in the host and in the post-immigrant generation.
I ran away from three different boarding schools before joining a circus school, and eventually I became an actor. The only thing I learned at boarding school was never to send my child to one.
There's only so much you can control in life.
People ask me where I live most of the time, and it's kind of complicated for me to answer, because I'm not really sure. It's somewhere in between London, Rome, Paris, and Rio.
I didn't have many girlfriends in my youth. I was an active young man, jumping from one girl to the next, but never with anyone for more than three or four months.
My father is best known for his light comedies, and I'm best known for crazy bad guys with short tempers.
The minute your parents die, you stop fighting them. I realized the more I changed my face for films, the more I looked like him. I always liked to disguise myself because I was trying to run away from his image. But all that is not worth it.
Blood, especially fake, and guns, this is bullshit. It works in the movie, but on set it doesn't work for me.
It's always interesting to see a director trying different things, and on top of it, doing it right each and almost every time.
If kids really made all the parents better, there wouldn't be crazy kids in the world.
Neither of us are workaholics. I think the key thing is to accept that if you only exist through what you do, then you become what you do, and this is very wrong.