Vincent Cassel
Vincent Cassel
Vincent Casselis a French actor best known to English-speaking audiences through his film performances in Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen, as well as Black Swan. Cassel is also renowned for playing the infamous French bank-robber and folk hero Jacques Mesrine in Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth23 November 1966
CityParis, France
CountryFrance
People ask me where I live most of the time, and it's kind of complicated for me to answer, because I'm not really sure. It's somewhere in between London, Rome, Paris, and Rio.
I feel like the so-called bad guys are never totally bad. I guess it's the closest thing I can do to reality: people act nice but nobody really is nice. We all have to balance that with something dark.
Cronenberg's a lot of fun, and that a lot of people don't know watching his movies. He doesn't take himself seriously. He's still reinventing himself.
I think life is short, and you can't spend time doing things just to be on set to reassure yourself that people are not going to forget about you.
I think I'm actually more vulnerable than people imagine.
I'm more attracted to the bad guys. Why? Because in real life, I don't know any good guys. I know okay guys. I know polite guys. I know people who can control themselves.
Cinema is entertainment, and people go to the movies because they want to feel good and forget about everything.
People look up to Jacques Mesrine as if he were a Robin Hood, stealing from the rich, but he never gave anything back to anybody.
People pretend to be nice, people pretend to be smooth, and polite and everything, but this is only an appearance, because the way we're built as human beings is only in paradox and contradictions.
I ran away from three different boarding schools before joining a circus school, and eventually I became an actor. The only thing I learned at boarding school was never to send my child to one.
There's only so much you can control in life.
I didn't have many girlfriends in my youth. I was an active young man, jumping from one girl to the next, but never with anyone for more than three or four months.
My father is best known for his light comedies, and I'm best known for crazy bad guys with short tempers.
The minute your parents die, you stop fighting them. I realized the more I changed my face for films, the more I looked like him. I always liked to disguise myself because I was trying to run away from his image. But all that is not worth it.