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EXCLUSIVE: Vincent Cassel has built a reputation over his 30-year career for playing bad and good guys with a menacing, violent edge from Vinz in La Haine, to ruthless gangster Jacques Mesrine, or a tough-talking mercenary in Apple TV+ series Liaison.
It is a surprise then to discover the French star in the role of the Greek mythology figure of Charon, the ferryman of the underworld, reimagined as a gentlemanly taxi driver, with charmingly accented but grammatically perfect English in The Opera!.
Based loosely on tragic love story Orpheus and Eurydice, Davide Livermore and creative director Paolo Gep Cucco’s original telling of the ancient legend mixes opera arias from Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Mozart, Vivaldi, Boito, and Gluck with pop classics such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power Of Love.
Cassel tops a cast also featuring Caterina Murino, Fannie Ardant, Rossy de Palma and award-winning Italian soprano Mariam Battistelli
“I like projects that are out of the ordinary and to find myself in stories that you wouldn’t expect to see me in… I’ve made films in Korea, China and now the world of opera. I was even contacted for a Bollywood film, and I was ready to go,” says Cassel.
“There’s a mercenary side to finding yourself in a completely different universe with people who come from different horizons,” he says.
“I didn’t know anything about opera. It was a bit like when I made Black Swan which allowed me to enter into the world of classical dance,” he says, referring to his role as the abusive ballet director Thomas Leroy opposite Natalie Portman in Darren Aronofsky’s dark psychological drama.
Cassel says he was not a stranger to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as a fan of Marcel Camus’s 1959 film Black Orpheus, capturing the character’s descent into hell against the backdrop of the Rio Carnival, which sparked his life-long fascination for Brazil where he lived for a time.
In The Opera!, Cassel’s taxi driver Charon accompanies love sick Orpheus around the underworld as he desperately searches for Eurydice.
Cassel says he took inspiration from Jim Jarmusch’s Night On Earth, starring Winona Ryder, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Isaach De Bankolé, Roberto Benigni and Richard Boes as taxi drivers in L.A., New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki.
“I felt like I was one of the characters in that film,” he says.
Shot at Prodea Led Studios in Turin, one of the first virtual sets in Italy, and using SGI and VFX effects, the film mixes a theatre aesthetic, with fantasy landscapes and live action shots.
“There was something very theatrical about it. I almost felt like I was working in a commedia dell’arte production” says Cassel.
The actor is not in Rome for the world premiere as he is currently on the shoot in Greece of Romain Gavras’ thriller Sacrifice, which also features Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy and Salma Hayek Pinault and Sam Richardson in the cast.
Cassel will not spill the beans on his role in the drama about a high-end charity gala that is raided by a violent group of radicals, saying “it’s a little early” to divulge details.
Cassel and Romain’s friendship and collaboration goes back nearly 30 years through their involvement as co-founders of the urban filmmaking collective Kourtrajmé collective.
While the association has branched out into other activities such as a school, under the instigation of later member Ladj Ly, Cassel says his personal and professional ties with co-founders Gavras, Kim Chapiron, journalist Mouloud Achour, Olivier Barthélémy and the rapper Oxmo Puccino remain strong.
“It’s not like we’re working under the Kourtrajmé label anymore, but we continue to work together to this day,” says Cassel.
The creation of the Kourtramajé collective grew out of Mathieu Kassovitz’s seminal film La Haine, which put Cassel on the international map as an actor, and also inspired Gavras and Chapiron, who were teenagers at the time, to start filming the Paris reality around them.
The 30th anniversary of the movie’s triumphant Cannes 1995 premiere and its successful box office run is fast approaching, but Cassel is not planning to participate in any anniversary events.
“I didn’t do it for the 10th anniversary, I didn’t do it for the 20th anniversary and I’m not expecting to do anything for the 30th anniversary,” he says.
“I’m over the moon that the film exists. It’s so rare for a film to remain memorable once it has left the big screen and for that I am thankful. If you have one, two, three films like that in your career, that’s already an achievement.”
“And it’s true that the film has retained a certain charm to this day and stayed in step with reality,” he adds. “Mathieu Kassovitz is even staging a musical inspired by the film and I’m hoping to see it soon.”
Thirty years on from La Haine, Cassel acknowledges the types of roles he is taking on are changing, with the actor recently appearing in a number of more classical adaptations such as Martin Bourboulon’s The Three Musketeers duology and Pablo Agüero’s Saint-Exupéry, in which he plays the iconic air pilot’s best friend Henri Guillaumet.
“Of course, things change. I’ve played sons, fathers, and I guess I’ll soon start playing grandfathers,” he says with a half laugh.
“Already if you look at my role in The Three Musketeers, my character [Athos] is the oldest of the three. Things change.”
Cassel says taking on the musketeer role ticked his box of working on productions that break with norms, even in if the film was an adaptation of the French classic by Alexandre Dumas. He suggests that producer Dimitri Rassam’s ambition for the films – budgeted at a combined $73M – was extraordinary in itself.
“When someone like Dimitri Rassam throws himself into an adventure, with the excess with which he managed to do it, it’s quite rare,” says Cassel. “To participate in something like that as an actor is fantastic.”
“What’s extraordinary is that since those two films, which worked, he has since made and released the The Count of Monte Cristo, which has been a huge box office hit,” he says of the feature which recently topped nine million spectators in France.
“The bet he made on French heritage, culture, in the age we’re living in, is really interesting, and we see people coming back to watch these sorts of stories again.”
As his roles broaden, Cassel is has not turned his back on the tough guy roles that have been a leitmotif through his career.
Last year, he co-starred in UK-French thriller series Liaison for Apple TV+ as a mercenary who comes to the aid of his UK government advisor, ex-lover, played by Eva Green, to foil a deadly cyberterrorism plot.
There were suggestions at the time that the six-part mini-series might be spun into a second season, but Cassel says that was never the plan.
“It was always a mini-series and that was why I took it on. I knew it was going to occupy me for three, four months, a bit like a long film, and then I could leave,” says Cassel.
“I wasn’t interested in working on something with a second, or third season. When I see actors stay the course on something like Breaking Bad, or Game Of Thrones, I think that takes real courage.”
The actor has since been in Breaking Bad director Terry McDonough’s Scotland-set serial killer crime drama Damaged, co-starring Samuel L. Jackson and Gianni Capaldi as a retired police detective.
Quizzed on his reason for taking on that role, he replies: “It was the director of Breaking Bad, which is one of my favorite series, and one week of shooting with Samuel L. Jackson in Scotland, where I’d never been before… I was like, ‘let’s do it!’.”
