Juliette Binoche interview ‘I am who I am with all my flaws'

Telegraph

04-04-2025

Juliette Binoche's Penelope waits 20 agonising years for Ralph Fiennes 's Odysseus to come back from the Trojan War, in her latest film, The Return. During that time she weaves cloth and bats off meathead suitors who have come to the Greek island of Ithaca to win her hand. Thankfully, no such patience – or haberdashery skills – are required in the run-up to our interview, for Binoche is a considerate few minutes early to the video call; no loom required.
Wearing a T-shirt, V-neck sweater and large glasses, hair tied back, her pale, otherworldly skin showing no sign of make-up, Binoche, who has just turned 61, looks more like a cool philosophy professor in weekend mode than the new queen of Cannes. But when we speak, she has recently been announced as the jury president for the 2025 film festival.
She has been a red-carpet regular there since 1985, when the film that featured her first major role, André Téchiné's Rendez-Vous, had its premiere at Cannes. It's also where she won a best actress award in 2010 for her role in Abbas Kiarostami's existential love story Certified Copy (she has a Bafta and an Oscar, too, both for her part in The English Patient). At the time of writing, she is yet to hear who her juror buddies will be. 'It's a great honour,' she says in her excellent, heavily accented English, 'we will be like a family.'
Now, she is miles from the Croisette, in still-wintry Paris, in the study of her home in the 14th arrondissement. The actor, whose tremendous work ethic means she has starred in more than 70 films across a 40-year career (and raised two children in the process), spins around her laptop to give me a camera tour of the desk in front of her. She has books and papers piled up high, next to old mugs that, altogether, give excellent teenage-bedroom energy. I'm reminded of Einstein's line: if a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk a sign? 'It will all be clean one day,' she laughs – gesturing theatrically towards the mess.
I'd say the chance of that desk ever getting the Marie Kondo seal of approval is minimal. Three years ago Binoche bought a country house near Narbonne in southern France, in the village where her grandmother lived when Binoche was a child, but she hasn't seen it for six months and says she doesn't even feel as though she lives in France any more because of all the travelling she's been doing. Later on, when I ask her about the state of French politics, she shrugs.
Part of that is due to The Return, shot in Greece and Italy, and in cinemas here from 11 April. Uberto Pasolini's film has been more than a decade in the works, but its subject is suddenly as hot as a Greek summer. Christopher Nolan, the director of Oppenheimer, is shooting his next movie The Odyssey with Matt Damon as Odysseus and a cast that also includes Zendaya, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong'o and Anne Hathaway. In that version, we can expect gods, monsters, Trojan horses and epic battle scenes.
The Return – while inspired by the same text – is a different beast. For a start, it doesn't have a beast in it… or a monster or a god, just a bunch of flawed humans. It is but a sliver of Homer's 24-book epic, concentrating on the aftermath of the Trojan War, Odysseus's PTSD, as the King of Ithaca would not have put it, and the toll that conflict takes on the women and children left behind. There are some bloody scenes towards the end, when Odysseus fights off Penelope's suitors, but it is bound to look like a conker fight compared to what we can imagine Nolan is shooting. In short, The Return is a slow, thoughtful chamber piece which allows Fiennes and Binoche to act their sandals off – and they don't hold back.
Binoche says she was excited about the project when approached by Pasolini – no relation to director Pier Paolo Pasolini; confusingly, he's actually the nephew of director Luchino Visconti. 'I didn't know very well about Odysseus, I wasn't really raised with it,' Binoche admits. She caught up by reading Emily Wilson's recent, jaunty translation of The Odyssey. 'I liked the dialogue being not explanative and as if we are going to the core of the story, so I said yes.'
She rather fancied playing a queen, having recently starred as a truck driver in Paradise Highway, and a chef – alongside her former partner Benoît Magimel – in The Taste of Things. The Return was also an opportunity to reunite with her old mucker Fiennes. They met more than three decades ago on the set of Peter Kosminsky's 1992 adaptation of Wuthering Heights; she played Cathy to Fiennes's troubled Heathcliff. But the pairing for which they are best known is her gloriously sexy nurse to Fiennes' memory-challenged count in Anthony Minghella's 1996 masterpiece The English Patient.
Binoche and Fiennes, who have remained friends, attending each other's plays over the years, are back on a roll, their chemistry threatening to make the screen explode. 'Ralph has been a friend since The English Patient and even more before then,' she says. 'I feel we are kind of like, in the same family.'
Fiennes has talked about her being his 'compass' when they act together. 'I was very moved to see Ralph and play with him because we hadn't been on a set together for a long time,' she says. 'And it was intense because the scenes are very intense: how do you go to the core of what needs to be done? As the writing was lean, the acting had to be somehow really right to the point, but available.'
Talking of lean, in order to play the battle-scarred King of Ithaca, Fiennes, 62, trained his way to a ripped body which he shows to full effect (he had to look strong and battle-weary rather than like he'd been downing steroids). He stands naked, front on, in one of the opening scenes, and for most of the rest of the film has only a rag to cover his modesty. Meanwhile, Binoche's Penelope, who does not know the 'beggar' who has returned is her husband until the showdown in court, is holed up at home for her own protection.
This meant Binoche only had a short stint in Greece, with the majority of her scenes shot on a set in Rome. 'We prepared, I went to Corfu for just a week and I had some rehearsal time and it was very full of discussions.' Pasolini's unconventional way of telling the story appealed. 'I liked his not wanting to have clothes. I liked the way he ripped ideas, as he wanted to be free and create something that was the closest to his heart.'
Binoche was born in Paris to Jean-Marie, an actor, sculptor and director, and Monique, an actor, director and teacher. When her parents divorced in 1968, she was sent, aged four, with her sister Marion, to a provincial boarding school. They spent many of the holidays with her maternal grandmother – there were periods when she didn't see her parents for months on end. Binoche has talked about how this period was a catalyst for her early experiments with make-believe. Was it this 'abandonment' she tapped into for Penelope? 'Yes, of course,' she says. 'But who has not been abandoned? Even from the start, being born into life, you are abandoned by your mother because you were so nicely comfortable in this warm liquid and suddenly you have to be… dealing with different sounds, the air, different sensations.'
Binoche's survival techniques involved acting at school. By 17, she was directing and starring in Exit the King, the Eugène Ionesco play, and studying at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique in Paris, whose alumni include Jeanne Moreau and Isabelle Huppert. The curriculum did not appeal and she left after a short stint, joining a theatre troupe and touring France, Belgium and Switzerland. Acting lessons were formative, and her early work included TV cameos and a small part in her first film, Liberty Belle (1983); after that she was hooked. Two years later she appeared in Rendez-Vous, which led her to Cannes and recognition.
Binoche thinks deeply, is a generous, if sometimes gnomic, conversationalist, and often sounds like a character in one of her early films. She could be talking about herself when she says of Penelope: 'I think she is not just a flat human being waiting and hoping, there is a warrior in her as well.'
In Binoche's case, that warrior is known for making directors interrogate their own decisions. I wonder if she gave Pasolini a hard time. When I ask him about his experience of working with Binoche, he writes back: 'Working with her was a true education; I was soon able to leave behind all my presuppositions and witness how Juliette's instincts could give life to the person of Penelope, rather than the character, in a way far more profound and truthful than I had conceived.'
Binoche explains how it was for her. 'I know Uberto well, he learnt to work with me,' she says, laughing. 'A director has to adapt to the actors. I said, 'The first three takes, you let me do whatever is coming to me. And then from the fourth one I will do whatever you want and try to be the closest to your idea that I can.' That was our deal – and it worked well.'
In one of the most powerful scenes, Penelope bathes her husband, wiping away the blood of his rivals for her affection. It reminded me of The English Patient, in which Binoche's Hana washes Fiennes's Count László. The obvious question aside – can the man not wash himself? – did it make her feel nostalgic?
'No,' she says, matter-of-factly. 'Because the art of the act is the present, how can we store the present and make it real, so I was not nostalgic. I was very much thinking of all the men coming back from the war and traumas and how much women have to feel, heal and repair.'
Binoche is politically engaged – you can find a video online from 2022 of her cutting her hair in solidarity with the women of Iran – and aware of the modern-day parallels to the Odyssey story. 'There are so many wars, the ones we don't speak about happening in Africa; but there are also the wars inside of our societies as westerners,' she says. She has long been a great sympathiser with the underdog, even when that dog was Harvey Weinstein. In 2019, when he had been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 80 women, but had not yet been convicted, Binoche asked that justice, as opposed to public censure, be allowed to do its work. 'I'm trying to put my feet in his shoes. He's had enough, I think,' she said.
Now the actor is waging a one-woman war on AI. While writing a documentary about the making of In-I, her 2008 collaboration with the choreographer and dancer Akram Khan, she was horrified by how often she was offered AI assistance. 'You have this icon that is pushing you to go and be helped or be replaced, your mind and ideas being replaced by a system? I mean, for me, it is so sick. It's appalling.'
She fiddles with her glasses; she's just getting started. 'It feels evil… it makes me angry. I am going back to writing with my pen. I want my own intelligence, or divine intelligence, or my friends' intelligence; I don't want artificial intelligence!'
How does she avoid a spiral of doom? 'I am who I am with all my flaws and my fire and it is true that sometimes I just don't want to read what is happening in the world because I feel it is so horrible, and I want to evolve in a different way. At the same time, fear is very human.'
Binoche's love life is not up for discussion, I have been advised, but she has a daughter, Hana Magimel, 25, an actor whose father is the aforementioned Benoît, and a son, Raphaël Halle, 31, whose father is André Halle, a scuba diver whom she met while filming Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991). 'Oh yeah they are quite angry as well. But you have to go into your light; what I mean by that is making gestures, actions, small ones,' she says. Such as? 'It could be anything, the simplest thing in the street, the smile is simple, we are all able to smile… it would be a weapon.'
For a self-confessed workaholic who worries about the world so much, she looks enviably unfurrowed. 'What do I do? I don't sleep enough,' she laughs. 'I like putting my cream on with rose essential oils. It is true that I do have a cigarette once in a while, but I don't smoke and I don't take the sun.' Does she wear SPF every day? 'Not only that, I put a hat on,' she says.
I wonder how she feels about so many of her acting peers partaking in injectables – and what it does for those who don't. She pauses to consider. 'Everybody has their own journey and it's not easy to be operated on because you are taking a risk, you know,' she says. 'I, personally, have difficulty watching a film where a face has been too worked on. That's me – some people don't have a problem with that. It is better not to judge because the fears are very big.
'Being judged is real in our business. HD is brutal. I am an actress who has been brought up in films and suddenly the change has been, like, what? What kind of skin is that? What kind of light is that?'
When I ask about future roles, she says there aren't a lot of scripts around that excite her. Might she do more TV? Binoche came late to box sets but in the past few years has been in two: the HBO series The Staircase and the Chanel-Dior drama The New Look on Apple TV+ (she is a wonderful Coco). 'I enjoyed doing them,' she says, 'but I am an old-fashioned lover of the form of films, it [TV] doesn't replace a film for me.'
Binoche has a reputation for being choosy, which has really paid off – she turned down Steven Spielberg when he asked her to do Jurassic Park, in favour of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours: Blue, an arthouse hit. 'It is important to be picky as people are losing their time and I am losing my time,' she says. 'That's why I don't watch a lot of movies. I need to be changed by a film and provoked by a film. It is like a book, I am not picking up any book.'
When I ask what she's been reading, she mentions loving Consuelo by George Sand and having a revelation at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, which she attended with Fiennes. 'I learnt about Saint Paisios [of Mount Athos], who died in the 1990s… I started the letters that he was writing, which I found quite fascinating. I also read the Bible almost every day.'
Really? Binoche was brought up by godless 'communists'. Yet she says her faith has grown as she has aged, as has that of her now 85-year-old mother (her father died in 2019). 'I am a Christian, French Orthodox. My mother is starting to be more Christian now, she has a relationship with Jesus. It fulfils my heart.'
Which films in her career do the same, I wonder. 'It is difficult to choose because you want to say, 'The first time I was asked to be in a film.'' She is speaking about Rendez-Vous, in which she plays a young actor who moves to Paris and has sexual adventures there. 'But at the same time it was a rough film and rough shooting because of the nude scenes – but it is the one that made me grow.'
Meanwhile, the Cannes Film Festival begins in a month, and I wonder what it means to her. 'It meant my birth as an actress as Rendez-Vous was selected in Cannes when I was 21,' she says. 'I discovered how this big film reunion can change someone's life in a few days. It is the place of great discoveries, a mirror of our minds and hearts of who we are.' Of course Binoche was never going to rave about the beach, the parties and the lashings of rosé.
As jury president, she says, 'Taking the risk to stand for what we believe in, is crucial. Being a president of a jury is really caring for each member to be heard and finding a possible harmony between our differences.'
Before an unnamed film project in September, there is a play she has signed up for, to be put on at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus in Greece, and it's very early days, but there is the idea of another – about Anton Chekhov and his wife Olga – which Fiennes has suggested. 'He is angry with me because he asked me to read it,' she says. More fury! 'Not angry, but annoyed that I am not quick enough.' She throws her head back and laughs raucously. So, will this extraordinary pair return? 'I think so, I think so,' she says. Better get weaving, it'll be one worth waiting for.