I’m Asking Vincent Cassel Questions as Fast as I Can

PARIS — Vincent Cassel was in a rush. He could spare no more than 20 minutes for our talk, I’d been told, never mind that I’d slogged five hours by train from Cannes to Paris for an interview that had been planned several weeks in advance.

Could Cassel be flexible? Not a chance, his publicist said. He had a pressing engagement. But no worries, she assured me. “Vincent talks fast.”

He’d have to. The clock was ticking, and midday traffic was bound to be dense as a mosh pit. To expedite my arrival, Cassel’s handlers had dispatched a motorbike, but the prospect of hopping on board seemed challenging, given my advancing years. Sensibly, I opted for a cab.

Dodging and weaving, we reached Le Perchoir, a louche, exotic rooftop bar in the rapidly gentrifying 11th Arrondissement that is strewn with shopworn kilims and fatigued palms.

The setting was meant to evoke the funky atmospherics of “Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti,” Cassel’s latest film, a romanticized, somewhat sanitized biopic that details the artist’s sojourn in French Polynesia and, in particular, his union with a Tahitian woman some 30 years his junior.

The movie, which opened in mid-July to tepid reviews, has at least one striking parallel in Cassel’s life: The actor, deep into his prime and once married to actress Monica Bellucci, with whom he has two daughters, 8 and 14, plans to wed 21-year-old Tina Kunakey, a Togolese-Italian model.

But we’d get to that topic eventually. I hoped. I was flushed when we met, and tetchy. He was unflappable. Dispensing with the gallantries, he said, “Let’s not waste time.” We were here after all to talk about his film, one that on this soupy July afternoon he seemed less than keen on promoting.

Settling into a sheltered spot on the restaurant terrace, we were on our own. Cassel’s entourage — publicist, agent, raffish assortment of chums — stayed out of sight, for the most part.

He’d accepted the part of Paul Gauguin, “because at this point in my career I had never really played an artist,” he said, adding, after a beat, “I thought I would be better maybe for van Gogh.”

He smiled. He shrugged. He let the subject drop. Continuing in the rapid-fire English he’d acquired as an adolescent living with his mother in New York, he fielded questions with the aplomb of the seasoned performer he is.

At 52, Cassel is one of Frances’s premier exports, canny enough to have won critics’ regard for his reptilian portrayals of villains. He was Jacques Mesrine in a four-hour saga about the fabled French gangster. Americans will recognize him as the cobralike assassin in “Jason Bourne” and the predatory ballet director in “Black Swan.”

He is stylish enough to have scored fashion spreads in Vogue Hommes and Numéro, and roguishly sexy enough in some recent films to have attained leading-man status.

An unnerving blend of easy charm and menace, he is among the latest in a line of celebrated French cinema hard guys (Jean Gabin and Jean-Paul Belmondo come to mind): wily, brooding antiheroes who exude a machismo rarely matched in modern American cinema.

It’s a tradition Cassel seemed pleased to embrace. It’s not about brawn, he said. His unsavory characters show a distinctly cerebral bent.

“Nowadays everyone is built up,” he said, thinking of professional hulks like Tom Hardy and Vin Diesel. “There is the law of the muscle you know, but it has nothing to do with acting really.” On-screen, he said, “if you got to be mean and hard, tough and dangerous, it comes through in an attitude, and let’s say, a mystery, more than in how much you weigh.”

Cassel himself is fit, his taut 6-foot-2 frame the product in part of his training as a dancer and circus aerialist. Some portion of his athleticism was inherited from his father, Jean-Pierre Cassel, the limber and ineffably suave movie idol who was known as the French Fred Astaire.

The son projects something more feral, claiming to have lately regained access to what he’s called his “manimal,” a savage side of his nature, he said, “that when you are not acting you usually hide.”

His inner beast takes on a different form each day. “Sometimes I feel as a jaguar and sometimes a pigeon,” he said. “A jaguar is cool, but we’re not always cool.”

At least not when it comes to love. The French, he suggested, are apt to take risks, to play by their own rules, unlike Americans who are a “more codified” and “a little plastic.” “People do things in a row,” he said. “You date. There are things that you do on first night, on a second date. Then you have sex.”

About 10 minutes into our staccato conservation, Cassel, who had been poised at the edge of his seat, fixing me with a penetrating gaze, kicked off his slippers and lounged elastically on a banquette. If he was flustered by occasional shadowy glimpses of his handlers flitting by he gave no hint, refusing to cast so much as a cursory glance at his watch.

He wore a deep blue shirt color keyed to his eyes and slouchy gray trousers. His style, he acknowledged, was itself a kind of performance. “When I come to an interview I’m coming as the nice-looking cool guy character,” he said. “In real life you’re not like that. You don’t always have time. Or you just don’t care.” Ticktock. Would there be time, I fretted, to ask about his childhood abandonment issues? (His parents had, to his dismay, deposited their very young charge at boarding school.) His attitude toward aging? His girlfriend’s rumored infidelities?

There would not. Still, Cassel stayed focused, barely looking up when his agent appeared across the terrace and showily tapped his watch to remind the actor of his urgent impending appointment.

We had just a few moments to return to the point of our talk.

His Gauguin is superficially hard core, the actor knows, having abandoned his family and bourgeois life in Paris for the rigors, and sensual pleasures, of life in French Polynesia. “Gauguin wanted to be free,” he said. “I admire that.”

But in telling ways, his Gauguin is undone by his attachment to his very young bride. When the artist spies her two-timing him with a Tahitian boy close to her age, he locks her in their cabin.

Can Cassel relate? He skirted the issue.

“There is a cruelty built into the difference between the sexes,” he said. “At any age, men have this ability to start a new life. Women do not. I’m very conscious of that,” he added, overlooking the myopic implications of that remark.

“It’s not always fair,” he said. “I’m 52, and I’m getting married with a 21-year-old girl,” referring to Kunakey. “I’m very much in love and sure we are going to make babies.” Still, it’s tempting to speculate, though Cassel would not, that he may one day find himself in a Gauguin-like position.

In any case, time was up. Twenty-four minutes had passed. I was making for the exit when I glanced across the terrace and spied him at a nearby table with a group of young friends and collaborators. At its edge sat a woman who appeared to be Kunakey, languidly fanning out her hair. I picked up my camera and snapped.

Cassel looked up, unfazed. “Paparazza,” he bellowed, with a genial leer. And that was that.