Beats there a heart any closer to the center of transcontinental cool today than that of Charlotte Gainsbourg? “It’s been three years now, and I like the place where I am, of being a real foreigner—not understanding everything, just going with the flow and at the same time being an outsider,” Gainsbourg says, characteristically shy yet no-nonsense, of her midlife move to New York City.
Gainsbourg grew up in the public eye, the daughter of the ultimate 1970s bohemian couple, British actress and pop star Jane Birkin (who offhandedly inspired Hermès’s timeless Birkin bag) and French crooner Serge Gainsbourg. At 46, she appears to be heading into the most public and productive phase of her career, with two movies and an album, her fifth, being released in rapid succession this fall (not to mention her ongoing duties as the face of Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent—her innate, I-woke-up-this-way cool, on display here at NYC’s Public Hotel, being the kind of fashion-world catnip that never goes out of style). In The Snowman, director Tomas Alfredson’s film adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s best-selling Nordic noir about a serial killer, she stars with Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Val Kilmer, and J.K. Simmons; in the buzzed-about French film La Promesse de l'aube (“Promise at Dawn”), she plays the mother in Romain Gary’s 1960 coming-of-age tale, a book she says every French student has read for generations. But Gainsbourg’s true labor of love is Rest, the album she’s been working on ever since she came to America. Produced by the hot French electropop-meister SebastiAn (Daft Punk, Frank Ocean), it includes an original song written just for her by Paul McCartney (“Songbird in a Cage”). But whereas her previous albums—hits in Europe—have been collaborations with the likes of Jarvis Cocker and Beck, Rest marks the first time that Gainsbourg has written all the other lyrics on the album.
It’s all almost enough to make up for Gainsbourg’s sabbatical, for the time being anyway, from the set of Danish bad-boy director Lars von Trier, who made her his muse for his provocative films Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), and Nymphomaniac: Volumes I & II (2013). One would think that a celluloid record of having welts raised on one’s naked derriere (as Gainsbourg did in the latter enterprise) would cure one of desiring such future liaisons, but the actress speaks with some heat about Von Trier’s latest work, the forthcoming The House That Jack Built: “He just finished a film that was not with me,” she says, her voice uncharacteristically rising. “Are you jealous?” I ask. “Yeah, very!” she says with a laugh. “Matt Dillon is his new muse,” she adds ruefully. Of working with Von Trier, she says, with evident hopes of doing so again, “It’s intense, but that’s what you’re looking for as an actor.”
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Photographed by Mark Seliger.
