My guest today is the legendary French actress Juliette Binoche.
Binoche is an iconic figure in world cinema – a classic movie star, a luminous natural beauty, an embodiment of understated style and grace, not to mention a fearless and formidable performer, who also paints and writes poetry.
As an actress, Binoche has consistently sought roles that challenge her to go to places of truth and genuine vulnerability, and in the process has become a muse for numerous auteurs, starting with her work with Jean-Luc Godard and Leos Carax in the 1980s, and then continuing across films with such great directors as Louis Malle, Chantal Akerman, Abel Ferrara, Michael Haneke, Hou Hsaio-hsien, Olivier Assayas, Abbas Kiarostami, David Cronenberg, Claire Denis and Hirokazu Kore-eda.
Binoche has won an Oscar – for The English Patient – and pretty much every other acting prize out there. She has starred in arthouse classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy ... and the Steve Carell romcom Dan in Real Life and the 2014 reboot of Godzilla.
She can currently be seen in the provocative and moving family drama Queen at Sea, also starring Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder Marshall. In the film, Binoche plays Amanda, a middle-aged academic with a teenage daughter and a mother suffering from dementia who is forced to make impossible decisions as she becomes caught in a spiral of ever-worsening circumstances. Binoche’s performance is tender, anguished, nuanced, finding every note of emotional complexity as Amanda is thrust into the center of an emotional maelstrom.
My conversation with Binoche was profound and connected, in a way that maybe should not have surprised me, but somehow still did. In it, we talked about: how she is “getting acquainted” with the Holy Spirit, the time she nearly drowned on a film shoot, her recent trip to Lesbos to visit refugees, communing with a friend who recently died, the reason she wishes she could fly, and much more.
Oh, and one thing I should say for clarity: before the start of every conversation, I let people know that if they’d prefer not to answer a particular question, we can just skip it. Usually, those moments end up on the cutting room floor, but, for a really interesting reason, this one remained.
Queen at Sea is out now in theaters, and it’s powerful viewing indeed. Also, go seek out any and all Juliette Binoche movies that are out there to stream; her body of work is remarkable.
his episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and our new theme music is “Partly Cloudy Days” by Oscar Louis.
Oscar Louis’s band Nowhere Else to Be has their debut album dropping December 4 – go follow them now!
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Next week on Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, my guest is comedian Adam Conover …
