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Hollywood star Julie Delpy: ‘I made enemies by saying no to very powerful men'
A soberly dressed British prime minister welcomes the French president on the steps of Downing Street. The leader from across the Channel puts her counterpart in the shade: she's blonde, glamorous, with intense red lipstick and elegant gold earrings. Soon, she is offering subtly cutting advice to her opposite number about the tense way the PM holds her face in the presence of photographers. Their relationship is already strained: in a hot-mic incident, the prime minister has described president Toussaint as a 'handmaiden to the far-Right'.
These are the opening moments of Netflix's Hostage, a political thriller in which the two women become entwined in a ransom drama involving the husband of PM Abigail Dalton (Suranne Jones). The actress who plays the French president – the film star Julie Delpy – has just popped up on my Zoom call.
I have to ask her, is her Toussaint – who talks of 'listening to my people' and appealing, on immigration, to a 'silent majority who value national identity' – based on Marine Le Pen? Did Delpy observe the National Rally leader while studying for the role? 'No, because I didn't want her to be that; it's a fictional piece and I think it would be weird to…' She halts. 'First of all, Marine Le Pen speaks very bad English; it would have been a very different vibe.'
Put-down neatly delivered, she notes: 'She's actually probably less of a Marine Le Pen and more of a Macron that's kind of flirting with the extreme far-Right.' Indeed, the weaponised wardrobe and one-upmanship chime well with the sitting president. Yet there's little of that in the 55-year-old Delpy, whose dress code is more cool professor than power dresser. But she certainly understands Toussaint's hunger to hold on to her role.
'I think for some women, and I'm not even talking in politics, for some women, power is very important. Even in my business, I've seen women fight so hard to get somewhere that they can become more fierce than certain men, because they had to battle twice as hard.'
Showbusiness is relentless, to be sure, and Delpy has been part of it since she was a teenager. Her parents were both actors, her father a theatre director, when the great French film director Jean-Luc Godard put her on screen at just 14, capturing her intelligent mien as 'Wise Young Girl' in his 1985 film Détective.
Within two years, she was turning heads in Bertrand Tavernier's Beatrice; by her mid-20s, Delpy had starred in Krzysztof Kieslowski's revered Three Colours trilogy, and become internationally adored in the quintessential indie romance Before Sunrise (1995). She played Céline, who steps off a train to explore Vienna with a passenger she's just met, Ethan Hawke's Jesse.
'It wasn't rape, it was manipulation'
Her view of the film industry at the time she joined it still shocks. 'Everyone knows, in France, there are people walking around making movies who were openly dating 13-year-olds in the 1980s,' she once stated. Today, she remembers saying it to a French newspaper, how it described a generation of creepy men twisting 1960s ideals of 'sexual liberation'.
'Oh, you know, it's 'sexual freedom', blah, blah, but I was very against it… it wasn't rape, it was manipulation.' For her, as a teenager, the manipulation came in the form of 'flirting letters, love letters. I've received a lot of those, you know. I was constantly getting [them], trying to get me to cave in, when I was 13, 14, 15'. They came from 'mostly directors, by the way, it wasn't producers so much,' she adds. But the predatory tactic was generally the same. 'It was the artist and the 'muse',' she notes, with irony.
Being part of that milieu, her parents were wise to it. 'My mom was very, very determined to stop me being a victim of that system. So she taught me, really young, to protect myself. And when I got to the US, I had to navigate the same thing. And I got a few enemies by saying no to very, very, very powerful men. I still had a career, but I did miss a lot of opportunities because I refused to comply.'
The pressures she describes are well understood now, in the post- Weinstein era. Delpy has straightforward views about those who abuse their position. On her celebrated countryman Gérard Depardieu, 76, who was convicted in May of sexually assaulting two women on a film in 2021: 'If he's [an abuser], he has to be punished for it,' she says. 'I don't excuse – he's an incredibly talented actor, but, you know, nothing excuses sexual abuse.'
'One of the worst feelings of my life'
Delpy, meanwhile, has forged a fascinating career as a writer, director and actress, which includes a role in the so-bad-it's-good An American Werewolf in Paris. Does she regret that one? 'Well, listen, [some] people love that film. So it's really funny every time someone comes up to me and says, 'I love Werewolf'. Even young people. I'm like, 'Why did you even watch this?''
She also starred in two sequels to Richard Linklater's paean to impulsive connection – Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), for both of which she received Academy Award nominations as a co-writer with Linklater and Hawke. She believes she and her co-star deserved script credits for the first film, too.
'We were naive young actors,' she says. 'It was not a tweaking exercise, because I know the difference, so I'm not going to pick that film as my favourite because I don't think it's right.' Not being credited for her work, she says, was 'one of the worst feelings I've had in my life'.
Fans still hanker for a fourth film, but Delpy confesses to reservations about how the story was resolved in Before Midnight, with the couple, now married parents, having a volcanic row that ends in rather implausible reconciliation. 'To this day, I don't love that ending,' she says. 'Maybe because I had nothing to do with it. That's an ego thing. But, um, I think the guys kind of did their little ending, and it didn't resonate for me that much.'
They have talked about a fourth film, she admits. 'Richard sent us an email, possibly about my character dying of cancer. And I thought about it, and I was like, 'Really?'' She feels the characters represent the study of a relationship over decades, 'and to have her die at 50… It confused me a lot. Because I'd say women have so much to say in their 50s – I was a bit concerned that maybe Richard was not really understanding that.'
Is Hollywood dying?
The film industry continues to struggle post-Covid lockdowns, with audiences dropping alarmingly for everything but blockbusters and low-budget horror. Is Hollywood dying? 'If films don't survive, it's a huge part of culture that's collapsing,' Delpy warns. She foresees difficult times ahead, though, with new threats emerging. 'When power becomes more overbearing and more controlling, more totalitarian, which is the era we are entering, I think art can be [seen as] a danger, can be a voice that people want to control.'
Political events in the US, she explains, are 'really worrisome… We are at that place, I think, where people are concerned that democracy might be in danger, which is never a good thing, no matter what your political views are.
'Those structures are at stake right now in the US. I don't think we're there in France yet. In England, I imagine that there's still a strong democratic system, but it's being eroded.' It's clear she is not aligned with Toussaint's views. 'I believe it's easier to blame immigration than to blame a system falling apart by itself,' she says. It's an effective tactic, she adds.
'It worked 100 years ago. It worked 200 years ago. It's working now.' Did playing Toussaint give her a sense that she would like to influence politics more directly? 'I'm not a very greedy person,' she says, 'and I'm not ready to make compromises, so I'll never be in politics.'
Hostage is on Netflix from Thursday August 21
