Louis Garrel has spent 37 of his 42 years in front of the camera. From a child actor in films by his father – the renowned filmmaker Philippe Garrel – to a brooding, melancholic romantic, and, more recently, the hapless comic hero of his own works, the camera has documented his career in real time.
Just when you think you’ve figured him out, the Paris-born actor, nominated several times for a César, reveals something new: an ennui-ridden revolutionary in Bernardo Bertolucci’s cult classic The Dreamers; the suave but toxic Jacques de Bascher in the biopic Saint Laurent; an uptight King Louis XIII in French blockbuster The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan; or Friedrich, Jo March’s scholarly love interest, in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. This year, he will star opposite Angelina Jolie in Couture, Camille Cottin in Juste Une Illusion, and Jasmine Trinca in It Will Happen Tonight, directed by the legendary Italian cinéaste Nanni Moretti.
Today Garrel has arrived in a different guise again: that of a working dad, with his four-year-old son Azel in tow. The actor is dressed in a black T-shirt and hoodie, loose-fitting, washed-out black Gap jeans, New Balance trainers and mismatched socks. He’s distressed about his socks – losing them is a constant failing of his, and even when he invests in high-quality ones, it never pays off.
“In the morning, if you have good underwear and a good pair of socks, the journey starts well,” he jests. Then he adds, with the kind of non sequitur that will become familiar during our conversation: “I don’t lose friendships. I still have the same friends, and I don’t lose people I love, because I’m still connected to them.”
Dior cashmere shirt, POA © Christopher Anderson Azel, whom Garrel co-parents with his ex-partner, the French actress Laetitia Casta, often comes to work with his dad. Garrel and Casta married in 2017, becoming a blended family – she has three children from two previous relationships, and he shares an adopted daughter with his former long-term partner, the director Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, older sister of Carla Bruni. They separated last year. “I don’t like leaving him with a nanny all the time,” Garrel says of Azel. “So I need to make him a bit of a gypsy.”
He’s describing a childhood that perhaps mirrors his own. In addition to his filmmaker father, Garrel’s grandfather was the prolific actor Maurice Garrel. His mother, Brigitte Sy, is also a well-known actress. All three starred alongside him in his first role in 1989’s Emergency Kisses. Most of his memories, says Garrel, are hard to distinguish from what has been immortalised on film. “I used to hate Emergency Kisses, but because I don’t have any memory of my mother and father together, except some flashes, I’m now happy to have it,” he explains. “Any movie that I’m making becomes a point of reference for my life at that time – it was before or after the movie.”
Garrel grew up in the red-light district of Pigalle in Paris, where he lived with his mother, their Irish Setter Valmont, and his pet jerboa (“hamsters are a bit conformist and conventional”, he jokes). For a long period of time, Sy taught theatre to inmates, and former students would often visit them at home. “She was always surrounded by so many strange, funny and interesting people, and intellectuals,” says her son. “I remember amazing parties.”
As a child, he was jittery. “I remember being anxious; in fact, I think anxiety is the word that explains my personality the most,” he says. That energy manifests, at least today, less as neurosis and more as perpetual motion. As he talks, he fidgets and, in the tradition of his countrymen, is very expressive with his hands. He vapes intermittently. His flowing conversation is both confessional and self-aware – he likes to land a joke. He also appreciates the value of pure entertainment; one of his favourite films is Lethal Weapon 3.
Directors have often turned to him, however, for his brooding looks. Among international audiences, Garrel is perhaps still best known for The Dreamers, in which he enjoyed a three-way romance with Eva Green and Michael Pitt. “It became a cult movie because it’s something young people watch in secret,” he says of the film’s erotic content. That performance included a resting pout so strong that someone created a Tumblr page of memes dedicated to “L’Humeur de Louis Garrel” – akin to Dawson Leery’s cry-face in Dawson’s Creek.
In Alice Winocour’s Couture, he will play a cinematographer working on a short fashion movie alongside a director, played by Angelina Jolie, during Paris Fashion Week. The two become romantically involved while she navigates a cancer diagnosis far from home. Garrel doesn’t have much screen time – most of the supporting roles are diminished by Jolie’s superstar presence – but he had time to admire his Hollywood co-star’s process. “In this movie, you don’t only see the performance of the actress, you also see the woman that Angelina is . . . she’s fantastic, she’s fascinating,” he says. “I’m very proud of being a part of the movie, because Alice captures something about our fatalism.”
Winocour, best known for her films Mustang and Paris Memories, says she instantly thought of Garrel for the role. “Louis has a magnetic quality, and he is more silent in Couture than in other films because I wanted him to talk less and focus on that,” she says. “I like this kind of character, [who is] like the actors I’ve worked with – Matt Dillon, Vincent Lindon, Matthias Schoenaerts and Benoît Magimel. They all show a fragility that lies behind a physical and animal presence.”
Garrel, who has directed and co-written four films to date, is continually refining his own cinematic voice. “I am trying to make movies in a different way,” he says, as he compares his work to that of his father, whom he calls a “painter”. “My great friend [the novelist and screenwriter] Jean-Claude Carrière once told me, ‘Louis, if you make people laugh, you open a door. And then when the door is open, you can go deeper.’”
In his own films he shines best when playing the unsuspecting leading man, always slightly on the back foot. The most recent, The Innocent, a romantic comedy-heist that premiered at Cannes in 2022 and won Best Original Screenplay at 2023’s Césars, follows Abel, whose mother marries a convicted felon, Michel, while he’s serving time – she teaches theatre to the inmates, and he is one of them. Once he’s released, Michel attempts to bond with his reluctant stepson, played by Garrel.
His mother’s true romance inspired the story, though Garrel makes it clear he took liberties with it. “I made this movie thinking about her and how she’s dealing with life,” he clarifies. Real-life experiences inform much of Garrel’s material. He is an unapologetic eavesdropper – one of his favourite pastimes is to sit for hours in a café. “It’s super-creepy,” he admits with a laugh. “But what’s more interesting than listening to two friends talk about some drama?”
It’s almost time to get ready for today’s cover shoot. Garrel admits he is not entirely confident in his fashion taste, but says it certainly caught his interest when he was a teen. He remembers trying to emulate the style of French New Wave actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. “He had a grace, and something very romantic,” says Garrel.
After the success of The Dreamers, high fashion came calling, first with Giorgio Armani, then Valentino – he was once the face of Uomo fragrance. Then he took the role of the infamous dandy and fashion muse de Bascher in 2014’s Saint Laurent and something clicked. “I came to appreciate fashion as a way to stand out and express something, or to invent your own style – especially at a time when everything was very normative.”
Given its omnipresence, the film world has been his entrée into almost everything. He hates to – and insists he can’t – dance, and he feels like an outsider in a nightclub for this reason (he also doesn’t drink). Yet in the upcoming Moretti project, he performs a choreographed dance to The Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow”. “I’m super-scared about it,” he says with a sheepish smile.
As he gathers his belongings, Garrel reflects on what film represents to him and why he has dedicated his life to it. “When I’m getting lost or anxious, or when I don’t know exactly how to recapture the vitality of what it is to be a human being or to be on earth,” he says, “I watch Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. His way of loving life is very contagious.” He pauses. “You watch The Rules of the Game, and you don’t have any argument for despair, because life is such a fantastic adventure.”
He rounds the corner, sees Azel, and says, throwing his arms wide, “Give your papa a kiss,” before planting a bisou right on the little boy’s face. The mismatched socks are long forgotten.