Clearly, this is a man for whom detail is everything, but who doesn’t want to look as if he tries too hard. At one point, talking about Heartbeat Detector, he says his character is “maybe a bit too much obsessed with perfection”; Amalric could be talking about himself. “He’s got this chimeric sensitivity,” says Nicolas Klotz who directed him in Heartbeat Detector, when I talk to him a few days later. “He knows that when we are most strong, we are also at our most fragile. I think he’s obsessive but also very lucid, very precise and he also allows himself to be directed. He’s childlike in that way: he has the confidence just to let himself go. He thinks deeply, but when he comes to work, it becomes a concrete task and because he is a director as well, he knows the problems and he’s very attentive, very willing to be directed.”
Amalric has prepared for the Bond role with a similar thoroughness. He has thought a lot, he says, about how to be evil. “Now that the Bonds are more realistic, you don’t know who the villain is anymore — they don’t have a metal jaw, they don’t have a scar, they don’t have an eye that bleeds. In this film, I don’t have anything to help me be a villain; I just have my face. So maybe his weapon is his smile, like the mystery of the smile of Tony Blair.” Or Nicolas Sarkozy, perhaps?
At the mention of the S-word, Amalric becomes instantly irate, leaning into the table so that it judders slightly as he speaks. “It’s not a joke,” he says as if he’s just witnessed me throwing a bucket of rotten tomatoes at an elderly woman in the street. “It’s very tough, very, very tough and it’s only been one year that he’s in power. It’s finished. I mean, the belief people had in him is just dead. I have a lot of difficulty now to find that exotic or funny or ridiculous. I’m disgusted.” He looks utterly stricken. It must be exhausting being Mathieu Almaric: the agonizing analysis of each narrative twist and turn, the frustration that he’s not doing quite what he wants, the stressful color coordination demands of his wardrobe.
And then, on top of it all, being forced to do interviews in your second language about the implications of the Holocaust and what he thinks of the baddies in James Bond. No wonder he has reservations about being an actor. But I wish, for a moment, he would stop taking it all so seriously. So I ask him to tell me his favorite joke. His eyes widen. “Wow. The problem with jokes is you hear a great one and you say, ‘I won’t forget this one’ and then you just forget them.” He lapses into a long, effortful silence. “There’s a very short one, about a Jewish son who calls his mother. He says, ‘Hello, Mama, how are you?’ ‘Fine.’ ‘Oh, sorry, I’ve got the wrong number.’” He delivers the punch line with a small smile. It’s a good joke. I am glad he remembers it, if only to provide some light relief for both of us.
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