It was an off-screen scene. In 2020, during the shooting of Tromperie (Deception), director Arnaud Desplechin took advantage of a break to smoke a cigarette with Léa Seydoux, who plays the mistress of a famous writer. Suddenly, she asked, "Who do you think is interesting in French cinema at the moment? Which directors?" With a smile, he sidestepped: "Lots of people!" But she insisted, completely serious, "Tell me! Give me some names." Léa Seydoux was not joking.

At the time, she had already had a career spanning some 15 years, and ever since her debut, the choice of director had been a determining factor – a way of establishing herself in life, the affirmation of a state of mind, almost a philosophy. In the past, Seydoux was chosen. Now, Seydoux chooses. And the names she collected from Desplechin – out of curiosity, out of appetite, and out of necessity too – are so many little pebbles she slipped into the bottom of her pocket to take out as fate would dictate, and with which she would mark out her path.

It's a strange destiny: Ever since she started out, it's taken her to both sides of the Atlantic, in an assertive split between quintessentially French director-driven cinema and Hollywood blockbusters. At the 77^th Festival de Cannes, she is front and center in Quentin Dupieux's Deuxième Acte (The Second Act), which opens the festival – out of competition – and opens in theaters on May 14.

In France, the list of directors with whom she has worked is long: Arnaud Desplechin, Bertrand Bonello, Benoît Jacquot, Christophe Honoré, Mia Hansen-Løve, Abdellatif Kechiche and Rebecca Zlotowski, with Arthur Harari and Leos Carax soon to be added to the list. The American directors are no less prestigious, from Ridley Scott to Denis Villeneuve, Quentin Tarantino, Sam Mendes and Wes Anderson, as well as Canadian David Cronenberg.

This unusual path continues to bring further and further along an actress who has said she never dreamed of being one, who claims not to be much of a film buff, who has always rejected the word "ambition" in favor of "desire" and whom none of her cinema elders have inspired. Seydoux threw herself into this profession at the age of 20 in an attempt, she has said, to put an end to the pain of living that had been crushing her from the inside since childhood.

She was brought up without much supervision, as she has recounted little by little in interviews, by rapidly divorced and very absent parents descended from two industrial dynasties, the Schlumbergers on her mother's side and the Seydouxs (head of Pathé and Gaumont movie studios) on her father's, whose name she bears without exuding the carefree spirit it might evoke. Her memories don't have the casual glow of the upper class. A teenage photo-booth photo has frozen the melancholy of her face under a bleached, layered hairstyle in fashion at the end of the 1990s. Extremely shy, almost mute and "wild," she explained when showing the photo to a journalist from the YouTube channel Bling! in September 2022.

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