The dark prince of French cinema

Vincent Cassel is happy to play the villains in American movies if it wins French film-making a wider audience, he tells Donald Clarke

You can see why Vincent Cassel is so frequently offered the role of the bad guy in English-language pictures. Saddled with an angular face and restless blue eyes, the French actor, though undeniably good-looking, does have a dangerous air about him. Few educated film fans will, after glancing at the poster of his puzzling new thriller Derailed, be in any doubt as to Cassel's role in the drama. Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston, their images rendered in muddy blue-greys, glance nervously in different directions. The lovers are in trouble.

Will Vincent be the caring copper who takes an interest in their dilemma? Will he be the gay best friend? The bumbling comic relief? Hardly. Cassel stars as a homicidal lunatic who beats Owen to a pulp, rapes Aniston, then, realising the couple are both married to other people, decides to blackmail them.

"I don't think it is to do with me," he says in beautiful English, coloured by the gentlest of accents. "It is to do with being French. French actors always play villains in American films. It used to be the British. I am not crazy about the situation. But I am trying to take advantage of it. I decline 95 percent of what I am offered - always these villains - but when I do take one of those roles I try and twist it some interesting way."

Though not yet a huge star outside his home country, Cassel has managed to appear in a handful of French films that have made a noise beyond the international arthouse circuit. In 1995 he was the nervy centre of La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz's frantic and, as events last year proved, prescient study of disorder in Paris's disadvantaged suburbs. In 2003 he starred in Gasper Noé's Irréversible, a jaw-droppingly disturbing drama of rape and revenge. His profile has also been boosted by romance, and latterly marriage, to the Italian actress, Monica Bellucci. They have one child and make such a disturbingly attractive couple that only those supernaturally unencumbered by jealousy will resist a slight hint of nausea at the mention of their names.

As a result, Cassel, now 39, has become one of the most prominent French actors of his generation. With that in mind, I wonder why he feels the need to play these villains in American films. He is surely not short of interesting offers from distinguished European directors.

"My real dream is and has always been to make French movies we can sell all over the world," he says. "And we have managed it a few times. Now, let's face it, if you want more power you have to go through America. This is not an end in itself. But if I do a few American films that helps me get films made in France. Particularly as I am now spending a lot of my time producing."

Appropriately for somebody who takes such pride in the business, Cassel comes from French cinema royalty. Jean-Pierre Cassel, Vincent's father, was a song-and-dance star of the 1950s who went on to appear in such distinguished films as Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Claude Chabrol's La Rupture.

"When you grow up as the kid of somebody famous, it's something you don't suddenly realise," he says. "It is, rather, something you are always aware of. I remember people asking him for autographs and not liking it. There seemed to be a lack of dignity on their part: pointing at him in the street. Obviously we are very different actors. But he had an influence on me. He came from a musical comedy background and that is quite physical. I am a physical actor too and I got that from him, I think."

Neither the elder Cassel nor Vincent's mother, a journalist, seemed at all keen on their son going into the film business. As he explains it, they felt that if he had sufficient desire to make it in the industry, he would somehow manage to defy their professed objections. They were setting him a challenge of sorts.

Vincent's first foray into show business involved, bizarrely, a spell in circus school. I can't really see him wearing size 42 shoes in an exploding jalopy.

"It was the back door into the business," he explains. "I learned to juggle. All that. I am quite good at acrobatics." Cassel goes on to explain that, when playing the role of a cat burglar in last year's Ocean's Twelve, he managed to do all his own stunts.

"If I hadn't been to circus school I wouldn't have been able to do all those scenes myself. It's funny. I had this fantasy that American actors could do all these sort of things themselves. I wanted to have those same abilities. Then, of course, when I got to do American films I realised they don't do that stuff at all."

From the late 1980s onwards, Cassel worked reasonable steadily, without quite breaking through. It was his collaborative friendship with Mathieu Kassovitz that really helped get him noticed. Cassel appeared in Kassovitz's first film, Métisse, before burning up the screen in La Haine. Set among the troubled suburban estates of Paris - the so-called banlieues - the picture revealed a side of France the nation's film-makers had hitherto largely ignored.

"It was amazing. In France people suggested that we subtitle the film in French," he puffs. "A lot of people in the industry couldn't understand what was being said. The cinema in France was this bourgeois microcosm. It is a little better now. But then you had this bourgeois de gauche as we say - the left-wing bourgeoisie - who ran the industry. You looked at the films of the time and couldn't see your own life there."

La Haine, a success throughout the world, immediately established Cassel - lithe, charismatic, physical - as a force in cinema. A year later, a calmer, more contained Vincent consolidated his position in Gilles Mimouni's playful drama L'Appartement. It was while working on that film that he met and began dating Monica Bellucci. The pulchritudinous twosome have made it their business to work together as often as possible. Their 11 collaborations include such varied films as Secret Agents (spies), Doberman (hoodlums) and Brotherhood of the Wolf (werewolves). How do they manage it? When one of the two is hired does he or she threaten to storm off if the other is not also offered a contract?

"No. I have too much respect for good directors to do that," he laughs. "It just tends to work out that way. But, yes, as soon as you start to be seen as a double identity then directors tend to become interested in that in itself. When he was making Irréversible, Gasper Noé knew that audiences would know we were together and that that would add something."

Ah, yes, Irréversible. Noé's astonishing film, told backwards, sees Cassel take savage revenge on the man he believes to have raped his wife (Bellucci). The scene in which Cassel hollows out the supposed assailant's head with a fire extinguisher is unpleasant enough, but it seems like something out of Wanderly Wagon when set beside the rape sequence. Lasting a gruelling nine minutes, consisting mostly of one static shot, the episode is one of the most controversial in recent cinema. I would be intrigued to hear just what sort of conversations Monica and Vincent had when they were considering doing the film.

"First of all I don't think it's bad for your career to do things like that on screen," he says. "And we were not very interested in the moral aspect, because this is a totally amoral film. But the reason we took it, perhaps, was that Gasper's original idea was much worse." I beg your pardon? "He originally suggested that we do a romantic story, but with us doing all these very explicit sex scenes. And we did really want to work with him. But we quickly realised that it wasn't right. That it was giving too much of ourselves away. So then he said: 'I have this idea. There is this story about a rape. There is no script. It is told backwards.' It seemed so much better than what we had been discussing, so we said yes."

Noé sounds like a skilled negotiator. It is said that Cassel's brother was so outraged by the rape sequence that, following a screening at the Cannes Film Festival, he threatened to kill the director. I assume the story is exaggerated.

"That story is true," Vincent says. "He is not in the movie business. He is a rapper, actually, and he just couldn't take it. The intensity was too much. I understood, but I did tell him maybe he shouldn't have said that at the Cannes Film Festival. It is a very intense film. I have seen it only twice and I don't want to see it again. It was disturbing for Monica to do it. But it was like breaking something for her. But, you know, she is crazy. She is even more crazy than she is beautiful."

Despite the odd catty rumour in the trade press (search the internet yourself if you must), Bellucci and Cassel appear to be enjoying a stable home life in Paris. They will be appearing together soon in yet another film.

Sheitan, which is produced by Cassel, follows a bunch of youngsters who fall in with Satanists. When the actor is promoting that picture he will, presumably, be asked yet again about his fabulous marriage. It can't be much fun carrying on such a relationship in public.

"Oh, it doesn't put that much pressure on you. It becomes an interesting exercise. You learn to let out a little something to the press, but not too much." And that is all he's saying on the matter? "Pretty much." He laughs. But he doesn't say any more.

Derailed is on general release