'LOVING SOMEONE IS IMPRISONING SOMEONE'

Far from dead, counterculture is alive, kicking, French and living in London. Jehnny Beth talks to Mark Beaumont about the tragedy of modern romance, saving the world and how the capital liberated her

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When Marvel call a broad grin, “Marvel will not call” — Jehnny Beth would opt to play a very solitary superhero.

“It would be nice to go back to superheroes that don’t work in groups,” says the former Savages singer turned solo star and arthouse movie sensation. “Superheroes used to be these lonely, sad characters. That’s why you related to them so much, they don’t belong.”

Beth used to be one such lone avenger. When she quit her brutalist, Mercury-nominated band Savages in 2016 and struck out with just her long-term musical and life partner Johnny Hostile as sidekick, this French provocateur and London adoptee seemed a pioneering but distant figure in the burgeoning post-punk scene. Gradually, though, she assembled a powerful team of cohorts — Joe Talbot of Idles, Nine Inch Nails’ Atticus Ross and Cillian Murphy (reading her poetry) assisted on her 2020 solo debut To Love is to Live, and she's collaborated with Gorillaz, Noel Gallagher, Julian Casablancas and, on 2021 duet album-cum-marital drama Utopian Ashes, Bobby Gillespie.

And having made a significant breakthrough in her parallel screen career, playing court monitor Marge in Justine Triet’s Palme d'Or and Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall, her pan-cultural powers have only strengthened. Today, fine-boned and slick-haired, she is speaking from Holland, fresh from a festival DJ set and en route to Brazil for another of the many intriguing roles she’s currently being offered. Recent or forthcoming parts include an autistic woman in Lola Doillon’s Différente — for which she studied and researched for a year because “I didn’t want to mess up” — and, by her own account, a whole lotta lesbians.

“People are like, ‘Oh, you're gonna be categorised as that lesbian actress,’” she says. “I'm like, ‘No I'm not, and what's the difference anyway?’ If I played only heterosexual characters, would you say that I'll be categorised as a heterosexual? It's absurd.”