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Since her first major role, in François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), Nathalie Baye has been such a central part of the French film landscape that it’s easy to take this most elegant of actors for granted. But in Le Petit Lieutenant, Baye, 58, reveals unexpected shadowy depths as the commandant of a police squad, fighting both bad guys and the old booze demon. On the phone from Paris, she elaborated on the movie that helped her bag her fourth César Award.
Le Petit Lieutenant was made two years ago. How do you remember the experience now?
[Director] Xavier Beauvois kept waiting for a specific actor to give his answer, and he ended up offering me the part. There was something really exciting about that adventure. Sometimes you have a great experience on a shoot and the result isn’t as great as you hoped, or it isn’t a commercial success. But preparing for Le Petit Lieutenant was thrilling, the shoot itself was intense and pleasant, and the film was very well received in France. So all these things make a great memory for an actor [Laughs].
Was it difficult to switch between action scenes and very intimate ones, like when your character looks longingly at the bottles behind a bar?
The movie has thriller elements, but it also deals with alcoholism. We show that people who have a drinking problem face temptation every single day. They go into a café, what are they going to get? It really made me conscious of these daily struggles.
Coincidentally, in recent years you’ve played two other characters with a taste for the bottle: Patricia (Patsy) in Absolument Fabuleux (2001) and a bored bourgeois in Noémie Lvovsky’s Les Sentiments (2003).
And I pretty much drink only water, a glass of wine from time to time… [Laughs] I’m tempted to say that to play an alcoholic, it’s better not to have a drinking problem yourself.
You’ve made five films since Le Petit Lieutenant, and you even dubbed Meryl Streep in the French version of The Ant Bully. What’s it like being so busy?
When I presented her with an honorary César in 2003, Meryl Streep asked me if things were as difficult in France as in the U.S. for actresses of a certain age. I told her that thankfully, French cinema is very faithful to its women. There were times in my career when people pictured me in just about anything, then they didn’t picture me at all, and now I seem to be back. When you make a lot of movies, you’re often asked, “Was that part hard to play?” I don’t like these kinds of words. The hardest part of being an actor isn’t acting; it’s when there’s no work, when you can’t express yourself, when nobody wants you.
—Elisabeth Vincentelli
Le Petit Lieutenant opens Fri 8; Click here for venues.
