There was a bit of a fuss in Europe when Mathieu Amalric told the press that "the smile of Tony Blair and the crazy eyes of Nicolas Sarkozy" inspired his performance as Dominic Greene, the villain in the latest Bond film, Quantum of Solace. Now, at a charmingly rundown hotel not far from where he lives in Paris's tenth arrondissement, Amalric tempers this: "That was shorthand. What really got me thinking were CEOs and politicians on television. You watch their smile and you start wondering, What's behind that?" He puffs vigorously on a cigarette. "I thought of Greene as being like wallpaper, with his smile as the ultimate weapon."
Amalric is used to being unobtrusive. Though he's become one of France's most feted actors (winning the César, the country's top acting award, in 2005 for Arnaud Desplechin's Kings & Queen and again in 2008 for Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), recognition came relatively late in his career. "When you've spent time like I have driving trucks and working in a set canteen, you can't help but see things as a bit of a farce," he says.
A supporting part as an informant-for-hire in Munich was his first high-profile Hollywood role, but Quantum should truly turn the spotlight on the 43-year-old actor. Still, Amalric shows no sign that he'll let his ego get carried away. "So much of what you do as an actor depends on the director, the music, the editing. All of these things are beyond your control."
When the talk turns to books, Amalric's large, saucer-like eyes soften and the live-wire tension in his body begins to dissipate. He is a fan of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, whom he often reads in English, he says. His mother was a literary critic and his father a foreign correspondent for Le Monde (both are now retired), and Amalric grew up in cities like Washington and Moscow, surrounded by books and intellectual argument.
"I'm not a man of sufficient excesses," he says ironically, running his hands through his floppy brown hair, before describing a childhood shot through with tragedy. "I never took drugs. My sister did that for me. My brother committed suicide. I'm obliged to be normal; I don't have the choice."
Such levelheadedness belies Amalric's taste for challenging, high-wire performances. In Diving Bell, for instance, the actor strapped himself into a wheelchair for the entire shoot to better experience the paralysis that afflicted the journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. "When I needed to piss, I asked myself what Bauby would have felt like. Here I am, I need to piss, and nobody knows it." And prior to Quantum, Amalric starred in the small-scale French art-house film The Story of Richard O., where he spent most of his screen time naked, having sex with a variety of women. "It was before having the baby," he says. (He has a newborn with his current girlfriend and two sons from his relationship with the French actress Jeanne Balibar.) "I can't see myself doing that today."
