Ex-Lovers, Reunited

In the 20 years after their breakup, Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel didn't speak much, despite sharing a child. Then they agreed to star in a movie together again.

- Rachel Handler

In a photography studio in Paris’s 11th Arrondissement, Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel are arguing—about everything from how they raised their child to whether or not they’ve competed with each other for camera time. They have a lot of ground to cover. Binoche, 59, and Magimel, 49, first met in 1999, co-starring as famous writers and on-again, off-again lovers George Sand and Alfred de Musset in Diane Kurys’s romantic period epic The Children of the Century (Les Enfants du Siècle). They fell in love on set and had a daughter, Hana, only to break up five years later. The two didn’t have much meaningful contact over the next 20 years until they were cast as a couple again in France’s 2024 Oscar submission from Vietnamese French director Tran Anh Hùng. Hùng’s film, which won him Best Director at this year’s Cannes, tells the story of an ebullient 19th-century French gastronome named Dodin (Magimel) and his longtime personal chef and sometimes lover, Eugénie (Binoche), whom he’s desperate to marry but who’s been calmly turning him down for 20-plus years. It’s a story that is in some ways an alternate-dimension version of their own, and in talking about it, they dive headfirst into the history of their relationship.

When did you first become aware of one another? What had you seen of the other’s work?