It is a gorgeous late winter’s day in Paris, and in a hotel lobby off the Place des Vosges, the picturesque historic square that counts Victor Hugo among its former residents, a sharply dressed concierge asks if I am here to meet Madame Cottin. She guides me to a corner seat by a cosy open fire to wait. It feels very formal, very elegant, very classy.
When Camille Cottin arrives, a few minutes later, she is elegant, too, casual in jeans and a navy blouse, a little nervous, warning me that as we are doing the interview in English, she might ask me to help her find the words. “I feel like I’m expressing myself like an eight-year-old,” she says, apologetically, though I should be the one apologising: it quickly becomes apparent that her English is immaculate and utterly precise.
Cottin, 43, has been famous in France for a number of years now, but during the pandemic she went global. The French comedy-drama Call My Agent! (known as Dix Pour Cent in France, after the 10% cut that agents take from their clients) found an international audience via Netflix, despite the fact that it was all but over in its home country – though more on that later. Cottin played the agent Andréa Martel, a swaggering, blazer-wearing character whom she describes as a “female Don Juan”. The clients Andréa represents are French acting royalty, with stars such as Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert and Sigourney Weaver appearing as heightened versions of themselves. She was the heart of the show, almost as dedicated to seducing women as she was to her job, and much of the series dealt with her failed attempts to find a life/work balance while looking striking in an impossibly chic wardrobe. Call My Agent! fans would be hard pressed to describe the tough-but-brittle Andréa as a massive laugh, but once she warms up, Cottin, goofier and sillier than her most well-known role, definitely is.
Why did people love Andréa so much? “Andréa,” she says, “is super sexy.” As she says this, she swings her arms out wide with such enthusiasm that she sends her teacup and its contents flying across the table. It is the second time during the interview that she has to ask the waiter for a cloth. She apologises to the expensive-looking couple dining at the table next to us, then collapses on to the sofa, mortified. “I’m sorry! I’m, like, banging things! I was just saying that Andréa is strong, but she’s very clumsy, too.”
It has been a huge few years for Cottin. She has entered what I try calling her Hollywood era. “My Hollywood pop-up?” she suggests instead, drily. She had a small part in the 2016 spy film Allied, which starred her friend Marion Cotillard and Brad Pitt. She co-starred with Matt Damon in last year’s thoughtful drama Stillwater, and drove a wedge between Adam Driver and Lady Gaga in the epic House of Gucci. Is she working her way through a list of Hollywood hunks? “Brad Pitt, done. Matt Damon, done. Adam Driver … ” Who’s next? “Do you think I could ask?” she says, with a throaty laugh. “I feel like I’m just entering the room, saying: ‘Hey’ and then it’s done,” she demurs, but the parts are clearly getting bigger.
She is here, officially, to talk about her return to Killing Eve. Cottin first appeared in series three, in 2020, playing the assassin trainer Hélène, who both taunts and flirts with Jodie Comer’s Villanelle. But there is strict secrecy around the show, and she is worried about what she can and can’t say. “It’s quite funny,” she says. “It’s very complicated to talk about something you’re not allowed to talk about. How can we do this?”
We try vagueness. Cottin has never played an assassin trainer before. “Absolutely not. That is a first.” The opening episodes of series four might as well be called Finding Hélène, as they are mostly concerned with tracking her character down. She is full of praise for her co-stars and was thrilled to have the chance of working with Fiona Shaw, whom she calls “the most exquisite person” – though, wary of spoilers, she is careful to say that their two characters in Killing Eve merely have a possibility of meeting each other.
Cottin starred in the short-lived French remake of Fleabag, called Mouche, and Shaw tried to introduce her to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who was in charge of Killing Eve’s first season. But it was not to be. “She tried, we missed each other,” Cottin says. It may happen yet. “That’s still something great, to be lived,” as she puts it. She speaks softly and poetically. She hits on an idea, then talks it through, working out its creases until she is finally satisfied.
Cottin is a native Parisian, born in the Faubourg-Montmartre, and she lives in the city with her husband and two children. In Paris, she explains, the traditional style is navy blue, simple, classic. “But I’m a very big fan of the British fashion, the excess and the eccentricity, how you mix Liberty and leopard print. I really love it.” When she was 12, her family moved to London, where she went to a French school, returning to Paris when she was 17. She soaked up British culture, particularly its music (“Freddie Mercury is my icon”), though admits that, as is the expat way, she mostly hung out with other French people. “That’s one of the things I would change if I could do it again.” She had always wanted to act, but as a teenager was too shy to go to drama classes in London, afraid her English would not be good enough.
Was she a shy child in general? “Wild, would be maybe more precise?” She laughs, then takes a long pause. “I’m trying to figure out the difference between being shy and being wild. I mean, wild, like a wild animal, like not being domesticated. So you can’t really approach the animal. But at the same time, I think I was shy, too, and at the same time, eccentric and over the top.” She found the rules and restrictions of school to be stifling. “In my education, they were like, whoa, whoa, we have to calm this one down.”
Cottin’s mother set up a drama club at her daughter’s school in London, where they put on a French play about the Trojan war. Cottin was to play Helen of Troy and she was thrilled about the casting of Paris, the Trojan prince with whom Helen elopes. “I was really happy, because there was this very cute guy one grade above us, who came to the theatre club, and he was going to act Paris.” Two weeks before they were due to perform, the cute guy dropped out. “So guess who acted Paris?” she says. I hold my breath. “My mum. I was on stage with my mum, disguised as a sailor. And she was talking in a low voice and holding my hands like my beautiful lover. I wanted to die. Freud would have loved this.”
Amazingly, Cottin was not put off acting. She did the equivalent of a master’s degree at the Sorbonne, studying English and American literature and history, and spent much of her 20s doing theatre in Paris. “From my 20s to 35, really,” she says. In Stillwater, which came out in 2021, she is a woman immersed in fringe theatre in Marseille; it’s a role, she says, that is the closest she has played to herself. “Honestly, I did everything. I did a lot of comedies, in rooms with 30 seats, where you enter the theatre and you’re there on stage.” She did bigger plays, smaller plays, some film and TV in France. Did she think that would be her life? “I was doing some castings, but it never really worked. So after a certain time I thought: ‘OK, well, this will never happen. But there are some exciting territories to explore still, even if I never work in cinema and television.’ And then it happened.”
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Cottin’s first big breakthrough in France came when she starred in a hidden camera prank show called Connasse, in which she sends up the stereotype of a rude Parisian woman by being awful in public. She smokes on a petrol station forecourt; parks in the middle of the road; talks loudly on her phone on the Métro, slating the people around her. As career trajectories go, it’s a peculiar beginning, as if Dom Joly went on to co-star with Cate Blanchett. The title is hard to translate. On The Graham Norton Show, Cottin opted for “Parisian bitch”. “But it’s not the same. I think a bitch is somebody taking advantage of people, whereas this girl, she just behaves like she doesn’t care about anyone. ‘Connasse’ is like this street word. It’s like the insult that you give to somebody you don’t know, who mistreats you, but in an impersonal way.” She lowers her voice, for the sake of the diners nearby. “Really, the word comes from ‘cunt’,” she says, cheerfully. “So I think it’s ‘cunt-esse’.”
In 2015, they made a film of Connasse in London called Princess of Hearts, in which Cottin’s character tries to track down and marry Prince Harry. She was arrested twice during filming: for climbing the gates of Kensington Palace and walking between the horses during the changing of the guard. She was jailed for two nights and banned from attending the latter for life. “I don’t think I’d do it now.” Another long pause. “At the same time, I’m telling you this, and I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I would. Maybe I would, yeah.” Is that your wild streak? “It comes back,” she says, with a smile.
After Connasse came Call My Agent!. The raucous story of a talent agency and its roster of stars, it was a slow-burn success. At the beginning, some feared that it would be of interest only to people in the industry, and in the first series recruiting famous guest stars was hard work. But by the second series, celebrities began to understand the joke, and storylines were written to mock stars’ public personas: the famously beautiful Monica Bellucci can’t find a boyfriend; Charlotte Gainsbourg is stuck doing a terribly arty sci-fi project; Isabelle Huppert sends up her workaholic tendencies.
Cottin is often asked if any of the guests made her starstruck and usually she declines to answer. “I always say, look, they were all amazing.” Perhaps it’s because she has chucked her tea all over me, but she decides to name names today. “When I started acting, Isabelle Adjani was it for me. What she did in Camille Claudel, Bonne Nuit, La Reine Margot and Subway … I wasn’t particularly a cinephile, and I have some gaps in my culture. But for me she was a goddess of acting. I remember that I was shaking hands with her, I remember holding her hand, and she has this very tiny voice. And I was like, oh my God. I was moved. A very strong emotion,” she says.
As a lesbian lead character, Andréa was unusual for French television. “And the fact that her sexuality was not an issue was also something very modern,” Cottin says. “The drama was around: can she have a relationship, can she be faithful, can she be domestic, but not: why is she a lesbian? So I think that was something very positive about the show, and very welcomed.” She based Andréa on a real-life agent who, she says, is also “super-sexy”. “And I was a bit influenced, too, by Ally McBeal, this blond girl who is also a lesbian.” Portia de Rossi? “Yes. I remember her long hair and I thought, I like this dichotomy, of having this super feminine hair, and walking in a very grounded and straightforward way, and this blazer, which had a very strict and sharp fit.”
In 2021, the show’s producers announced there would be a feature-length film and a fifth series, which came as a surprise to many fans, who felt the ending had been emphatic. I don’t know what is happening with it, I say. “Me, neither,” Cottin says. “They’re moving step by step. I know they’re working on the film.” Is she involved? “In the writing? No.” In its return? “In principle, yes. I don’t think anyone would leave the ship. You know, that would be like not turning up at Christmas.” Andréa’s ending was a relatively dark one, so she sees it as a chance of redemption. “She was eating the dust. So it could be quite cool if she comes back. Some friends said to me, ‘Andréa is Daenerys. She’s the mother of dragons. What’s happening? She can’t be like this!’ So in a way, it could be interesting that it’s not her last word.”
Such was Call My Agent!’s success that, inevitably, it is now being remade around the world. She says that in the Turkish version, Andréa will be straight, which saddens her. “I mean, I am more than sad,” she says.
W1A’s John Morton has adapted the programme for the UK, where it will feature cameos from Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Corrin, Kelly Macdonald and Dominic West. Rebecca, loosely modelled on Andréa, will be played by Lydia Leonard. “I have a great trust and faith in the British remake,” Cottin says. “I’m not saying this because you’re British, but I’m a huge fan of British fiction, and TV, and I think you’re doing amazing things.”
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Cottin is now a fixture of the Hollywood world that Call My Agent! satirised. She shares a big-time agent with Sigourney Weaver, who guest-starred in the fourth series. In Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, she plays Paola Franchi, for whom Adam Driver’s Maurizio Gucci leaves Lady Gaga’s Patrizia. Her character arrives on a ski slope, in a fabulous blond wig, and faces off with Gaga over apple strudel. Never has pastry been so dramatic.
The film was famously stuffed with method actors, with Gaga not breaking character at all; she told Cottin that because their characters were enemies, she couldn’t talk to her outside their scenes. “She did it in a very lovely way. I didn’t know her, but I’d seen the documentary about her. And you can see how she wouldn’t be where she is if she wasn’t such a hard worker. Very focused. I have a lot of admiration and respect.”
Was she ever tempted to go full method herself? “To be honest, I would have loved to do this,” she chuckles. “But as a mum, if I come and pick up my children as an assassin trainer? Handing them a croissant and saying: ‘Be careful, we’re being watched,’ pushing them into a black car.” She laughs. “I’m kidding. But honestly, I would have loved to do this, because the result is brilliant.” She hopes that she and Gaga will meet again, under different circumstances. “I really regret that she’s not nominated at the Oscars, because I think she’s fantastic.”
I wonder if finding success in her 30s, then more in her 40s, suits Cottin’s personality more than if it had happened in her early 20s. She nods. “Definitely, because I’m grounded.” She chooses this word deliberately, because her husband is an architect and she likes the metaphor. “I understand how one can lose balance. There’s a certain fragility that can emerge from success, so having built a strong family, and I’m talking about friends also, the people around you, I think it helps.”
Do her children understand her fame? “I think they do. Sometimes they question it. They’re like: ‘Are you more or less famous than [the footballer Kylian] Mbappé?’” She laughs. “I’m like, less, less, less. And I love Marion Cotillard, she’s a good friend of mine. And my son is like: ‘You’re much less famous, aren’t you?’ And I’m like: ‘Much less, yeah.’”
There have been moments when she has worried being older might mean she has less time left in her career. “But I think that’s not true. Being a woman over 40 now in the industry is interesting. I think that’s something to keep in mind, rather than thinking, oh, this is a tricky moment.” She mentions the Oscar nominations; apart from Kristen Stewart, the best actress candidates are all over 40. “I think there’s a big demand for creating content and seeing those women of a certain age that have been invisible. There’s a desire for that.”
After Killing Eve, Cottin will appear in the biopic Golda, as Lou Kaddar, secretary and assistant to the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, played by Helen Mirren. There has been debate over Mirren’s casting, which some critics have labelled “Jewface”. “I know, I’ve read that,” Cottin nods. “I think Helen answered in a very, very brilliant and intelligent way, and also respecting the point of view, because that’s definitely an issue of representation.”
There has been a similar discussion about whether gay roles should be played by gay actors. “Well, having played a gay character,” she says, “I had this conversation this morning with a friend, a gay friend, an actor, and we laughed about it. And I said: ‘Maybe they thought, she’s gay, she’s definitely from the community, the only thing is she doesn’t know it.’” She laughs. In Killing Eve, Hélène is a lesbian, too. “Yeah. But we were talking about how acting allows you to be yourself, by exploring someone else. So which part of me is that woman? That’s the mystery, and I don’t know until I explore it and discover it.” She adds that if she had not been able to play Andréa, she would have been “devastated”.
After Golda, Cottin is working on another project, though she can’t say what, for now. She is in the early stages of setting up a production company with a friend, a feminist documentary film-maker, and is reading novels to see which they might adapt. As the table is wiped clean of tea, she gives me a recommendation for a book she is considering working on. Cottin is such a good talker that we have chatted for far longer than we should have.
What would she like to do next, career-wise, I ask? “There are so many things I haven’t done,” she says. Maybe theatre; perhaps perform on stage in London, at long last. She doesn’t skip a beat: “But this time, without my mum!”
• Series four of Killing Eve is on now on BBC One and iPlayer.
