Laure Calamy certainly makes a jaunty entrance. She’s somewhere out of sight in the kitchen of her Paris flat, and all I can see on my laptop is a vividly coloured glass partition – a Mondrian pattern of rectangles in rich shades of red and orange. Then suddenly the French actor comes into view, greeting me with a big “All-ôôô!”, so perkily singsong that the English equivalent would have to be “Coo-eee!”
I like the panel, I tell her. “I found it in a little shop where I used to live,” she says. “I’m crazy about glassworks and those colours. I found this, et hop …!” – she bought it. You can imagine Calamy’s best-known character, Noémie Leclerc from the hit Netflix series Call My Agent!, buying something similar in a burst of enthusiasm: et hop! With her ebullient energy, fast, throaty delivery and her dress style today – green leopard-print top, big hoop earrings – you might easily assume that Calamy and her TV character are a very close match.
Certainly, Calamy plays Noémie with such relaxed exuberance that it feels an effortless creation. Her role as the frazzled staffer in a top Paris talent agency made Calamy a universally recognised face after two decades in French film and TV. And the success of Call My Agent! has launchedher into a series of ever-more prominent big-screen roles, some considerably more heavyweight than her TV image as an insouciant farceuse may suggest. Now being feted with big acting awards, Calamy, 48, has emerged as something like France’s answer to Olivia Colman – an approachable screen presence who seemed always to have been around, inspiring widespread affection, then suddenly bursting into the limelight as a formidable talent whose moment was long overdue.
She plays the lead in Éric Gravel’s Full Time, which was released last week in the UK – a realist drama about work stress that also works brilliantly as a race-against-the-clock nail-biter. Calamy won the 2021 Orizzonti best actress award at the Venice film festival for her role as Julie, a highly qualified market researcher who, divorced with two children, works as a chambermaid in a high-end Paris hotel. Much of the film involves Julie racing to and from work, while surreptitiously attending job interviews, the ante raised by city-wide transport strikes: “I think it’s pretty clear that this film is not against strikes,” Calamy cautions.
Indeed, Full Time is a very political film about the tribulations of earning a living, notably in jobs that bring little prestige yet involve high degrees of professionalism. Calamy took a crash course training in luxury hotels to perfect her technique and movements: “Like changing a bed very fast, making it excellent. It’s a whole choreography, and seeing the rhythm those women work at, it’s dazzling.”
She was attracted to Full Time partly because a friend was a union official who supported Paris hotel staff fighting for better conditions. “The jobs are subcontracted out and these women are paid by the room – so all the time they spend going from floor to floor, none of that is taken into account. It’s extremely hard physical work – you see women who have been doing it for 15, 20 years, and they have tendinitis, back problems, all kinds of issues.”
In its own way, Call My Agent! is also about the realities of work, with its demystifying picture of French showbusiness as an everyday, often desk-bound hustle. Calamy’s role as Noémie began as frothy comic support, but with time developed very differently. “Someone said to me: ‘Oh, Noémie’s a bit nunuche” – “ditzy” may be the best translation – “but I wouldn’t see her that way. Not when you discover her depth.”
In season two, Noémie embarks on a very workplace-inappropriate romance with agency boss Mathias, and emerges gradually as a force of nature, intensely sexual and much cannier than anyone suspected. “What I liked was that it starts out with a cliche – the boss and the assistant – and then it’s flipped over. At the start, the fragility’s all on her side, but then she starts to put herself forward, and emerge as a desirable and desiring person, and a thinking one.” Calamy owes Noémie a lot, she says: “Over four seasons, she took on more and more substance – she grew, and I grew with her. She helped me feel a lot more confident myself.”
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Calamy grew up near Orléans; her mother was a psychologist, her father a hospital doctor. She got the acting bug, or the clowning bug, early. “I don’t remember this, but apparently my mother took me to the circus when I was four, and I said: ‘I want to be a circus lady!’”
Her comedy roles allow her to be that – in a way. She won the best actress award at France’s Césars with a film that highlights the broader end of her range, but with an uneasy emotional undertow: 2020’s My Lover, My Donkey & I. Not nearly as louche as the English title suggests – in French, it’s Antoinette dans les Cévennes – it’s a sort of anti-romcom about a woman who goes donkey trekking in the southern French mountain region to stalk her married lover. Calamy knows the Cévennes well: she spends time there with her Colombian partner, who is a mountain guide. “He has a little mazet,” – a small, very basic rural house – “no water, no electricity, very rudimentary.”
Despite Calamy’s comic forte, her reasons for taking on projects are often highly serious, as witness Full Time. “The directors I choose to work with are ones with a political viewpoint,” she says. Hence, leads in two recent dramas with strong feminist themes (Calamy is a member of Le Collectif 50/50, the organisation for gender equality in French cinema). In Angry Annie, she played a woman who becomes an activist for abortion rights in the 1970s; in Her Way, a sex worker whose trade is presented in matter-of-fact terms, just daily life for a single mother out to earn a living. Her Way is about women who opt for sex work as a free choice, says Calamy: “The ones who say: ‘I’d rather do this than pack shrimps in a factory all day long.’”
Decidedly anglophile in her cinematic tastes, Calamy loves Ken Loach: “There’s something epic, something really Brechtian about his films.” She also adores Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (“Extra-ordinaire! Extra-ordinaire! It’s like Dante’s Inferno!” she enthuses, wide-eyed). And then there’s an all but forgotten 1993 drama called Anchoress, which she has seen four times: “Totally hardcore art cinema,” she says. It’s a medieval drama in which Toyah Willcox plays the mother of a girl who aspires to sainthood: “You’ve got the daughter, who’s very mystical, while her mother is this hyper-liberated woman who pisses in front of the church. I identified with both of them!”
Since we spoke, Calamy has been confirmed as the lead in a new French HBO series about the real-life case of a woman who falsely claimed to have been a victim of the Paris Bataclan attacks. Before that, UK viewers can look forward to Sébastien Marnier’s film The Origin of Evil, a definite departure for her. A very black comedy thriller, it stars Calamy as a factory worker who gets entangled with a snake pit of a moneyed family. “You could definitely say that [Sébastien] wanted to get away from anything you know about me,” Calamy says. “The sunny, sporty, flamboyant characters. He wanted to take that image and mess with it – dirty it up,” she says with a big, appropriately dirty laugh.
Her last few films suggest that we have only just begun to get a sense of what Calamy can do in lead roles. Full Time director Gravel tells me: “She always says: ‘Women get good roles in their 40s, but I know it won’t last.’ I don’t agree – I think we’re going to see her on screen for a long time. She has this energy which was just waiting for the right moment.”
Full Time, which features Calamy pretty permanently in fevered constant motion, feels perfectly tuned to her particular dynamism. “I loved all the running. I need to let off steam physically – I have too much energy at times. People usually ask me to walk slower – so let’s say this film corresponded to my rhythm.” From here on, Calamy can expect to set her own pace and cinema will just have to keep up with her.
Full Time is in UK cinemas; The Origin of Evil is released later this year
