36 Minutes With Isabelle Huppert

The French actress is finally (sort of) going mainstream, and she doesn’t hate it.

- Amy Larocca

I DO NOT LIKE the word challenge,” says Isabelle Huppert. Acting, she says, has always come naturally, like a language she was born already knowing how to speak. Over the course of her 45-year career, she has worked with legendary directors like Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michael Haneke, and she has won prizes at Cannes and at the BAFTAS, so it would not make that much sense to describe 2016 as her “breakthrough” year. And yet, somehow, it was. The double-whammy of Elle, a complicated and epically satisfying film by the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, and Things to Come, a film as quiet and emotional as Elle is subversive, means that Huppert is now enjoying big visibility in America (never mind that both films are subtitled) and a following that is moving away from the fringe. (She remains, however, committed to intense theatrical work, including a production of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Phaedra(s) at BAM last year that was described by one critic as “three hours of vomit, fellatio and menstruation.” But she likes the idea of being in a big Broadway blockbuster, too, should such a thing be offered. “I would love it!” she says, twinkling a bit. “Of course!”)

On a gray winter afternoon at the Mercer Hotel, Huppert looks 100 percent the part of the French film star in a tightly belted trench coat with big, sharp lapels, clicking across the lobby with her signature gait, which gives the impression that an invisible thread is pulling her ever forward by her slightly upturned chin. Huppert is small—five-foot-three—and very slight, and she moves with complete determination. There are no extraneous gestures or words; the impression she leaves is of the most self-actualized human being in the world.