Marion Cotillard: “I don’t like to kill people, so that’s why I didn’t play Assassin’s Creed”

There’s a slightly awkward atmosphere in the holding room for Marion Cotillard. Just a few weeks earlier, lying tabloids had – with nothing even approaching evidence – attempted to pin the dissolution of Brangelina on the French woman. We have been politely urged not to ask her about that (this sort of injunction is rarer than readers might fear). I won’t be asking about alien visitation or crop circles either.

Calm reigns within Ms Cotillard’s chamber. She sits upright wearing a friendlier face than most French superstars allow. Because I’m a bleeding peasant, I spend the first few minutes staring at the apparently irregular holes on her sweatshirt trying to work out if she’s dropped hot fag ash on them. Of course, they’re meant to be there and the garment undoubtedly cost squillions.

Cotillard does not slap you on the back and tell rude jokes about nuns. But she is, in her quiet, thoughtful way, perfectly friendly. I wonder how she manages such impressive physical transformations. Her Oscar-winning version of Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose seemed like an entirely different human to the one in the expensively peppered sweatshirt.

There is a very long silence. Maybe this is a stupid question.

“No, it’s not stupid,” she says. “I just don’t know how to answer it. I make myself believe that I am a different person. If I believe it, then I hope others will too. The way someone breathes is important. It creates tension in the body. It changes the way you walk. Traumas affect how you breathe, too. It changes how open or closed you are. It adds physicality to the role.”

Brad and Michael
Cotillard has been using her patented breathing techniques on a lot of sets recently. In November we saw her opposite Brad Pitt (hence the tabloid inventions) in the diverting war film Allied. She begins the New Year with a surprising diversion. Justin Kurzel's Assassin's Creed brings two surprisingly grown-up actors – Marion and Michael Fassbender – to the hitherto unlovely genre that is the videogame adaptation.

There's a further oddity. Kurzel, Cotillard and Fassbender went straight to the project from their rough-hewn adaptation of Macbeth. One of these things is not like the other.

"It was not as if the film is a big dumb comedy," she says of Assassin's Creed. "But it is a very different kind of movie. There is a lot of violence. But there's violence in Macbeth as well. Making the film involves the same commitment, the same depth. Justin is one of the best directors I've worked with."

Cotillard is known to take her work seriously. I wonder if she spent time playing Assassin's Creed. There is certainly fun to be had in that wall-scaling, pickpocketing, period action-adventure game.

“No. I didn’t.”

Ah, Marion. That’s the easiest sort of research.

"I know. I know. There are videogames I love. My favourite is called The Box. It's a box and you need to find out how to open it and then inside that there's another box and then another box. I don't like to kill people, so that's why I didn't play Assassin's Creed. Even when I played Lara Croft I loved the physical thing, but when she got to kill the wolves I didn't like it. I didn't even like killing the bad guys. That's not my thing."

Star in France
Cotillard was born into the theatre. Her parents (Jean-Claude Cotillard and Niseema Theillaud) were both successful actors. As a child, she appeared in her dad's plays and began picking up smaller roles in films and TV as a teenager. It took a while for her to register outside France, but, born in 1975, she was already, by her early 20s, a domestic star.

“My father was very supportive. Neither of my parents held me back. They knew it was a hard life, but they respected my choice. It was meant to be. So, yeah, they were very supporting.”

With her singular looks (her mother has some Algerian blood) and intense, focused delivery, Cotillard was always likely to make an impact. Still, even the most talented actors can fall through the cracks. Does she know what she would have done if the casting directors hadn’t called?

There is another enormous silence as she steeples her fingers and smiles at the ceiling.

“I might have worked with kids,” she says. “Yeah. I don’t know. It is hard to . . . Yes, music and kids. I would have found something round that.”

She has released a few records. So we can call her a musician.

“I wish . . . I am not a musician I have too much respect for musicians to say that. I love to sing. I play a bit. But I wouldn’t call myself that. It’s just something that I do.”

Cotillard has done something that relatively few French stars have managed. Even one of Isabelle Huppert's mighty status has struggled to find roles in the US (presuming she wants them). Juliette Binoche has had some success in English-speaking roles. But Cotillard has actually managed to become a proper marquee-fronting movie star. Michael Mann cast her in Public Enemies. Christopher Nolan chose her for Inception and The Dark Knight Rises. As long ago as 2003, Tim Burton found her a role in Big Fish.

Oscar game-changer
Still, it was the Oscar for La Vie en Rose that really changed things for Cotillard. There was some heavyweight competition that year, but the French woman powered past Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett to take the statuette.

“Of course, it changed life for me,” she says. “I started to work in the US, which was something I never expected. I began to share my life between France, the US and England. I shot a lot of my movies there too. So, I always wanted to explore as much as I could. That’s why I wanted to be an actor.

"To be able to explore more than my culture is something that I am very grateful for. This comes from playing a Polish girl, an Italian girl, half-American with Public Enemies. None of those experiences would have happened without La Vie en Rose."

We all think we know what the Oscars are like. But I don’t imagine anything can prepare a person for the shock of being summoned to the podium. What surprised her about the experience?

“I didn’t want to prepare something to say and that drove my agents and publicists crazy,” she recalls. “But I wanted to live in the present – in the here and now. I didn’t want to have to think about getting the Oscar or getting there before getting nominated. I didn’t want to think about anything that would take me out of the now. So, I lived all those moments. I was surprised by the fact that a French movie in French had done it. That was something special.”

Personally private
Cotillard has been romantically entwined with the distinguished actor and director Guillaume Canet since 2007 and the two have vigorously protected their privacy ever since. We do know that they have one child and that Cotillard is merrily pregnant with a second.

The timing could hardly be more immaculate. Cotillard completed five films in 2016 – both Xavier Dolan's It's Only the End of the World and Nicole Garcia's From the Land of the Moon premiered at Cannes – and is nicely positioned to take some time off.

“Well I worked hard for a year,” she says. “I made five movies and I just shot another movie. That makes six. I have to promote then all. Oof! That takes me to March, when I am about to be a mum again. So, I guess I am going to take a good while off. Yes?”

Yes. We wouldn’t begrudge Marion Cotillard that.

- Assassin’s Creed opens on January 1st.