In 2018 she told the Los Angeles Women’s March that role made her feel “unsafe” and that “men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body”. One of the first pieces of fan mail she received was from a man who fantasised about raping her. However, disquiet over Léon has become a significant element in the #MeToo campaign, after Reno’s co-star Natalie Portman revealed how playing a sexualised 12-year-old character tarnished her adolescence. And the actor had an endearing, lumbering naivety that perhaps allowed the director – particularly with Leon, his international breakthrough – to acceptably package its transgressive side. Which sounds more than reminiscent of a certain hitman flick in Léon: The Professional, as well as the free-diving fantasia The Big Blue, Reno gave Luc Besson charismatic focus for his Americanised cinéma du look. Maybe people would love you being somebody else.” Troupe atmosphere still seems to be crucial for Reno, the basis on which he picks his roles: “If I can see more or less what the ambience is going to be, I’ll take that.” Reno seems to have found what he was looking for on The Doorman with its producer, Harry Winer, he’s currently cooking up a story about an old singer who takes a young musician girl under his wing. “I’m not Freud, but maybe I wasn’t happy with what I was. Theatre was, he thinks, a means of escape – perhaps from the kind of struggles experienced by his immigrant parents. “At that moment, I could be happy, because no one was looking at me, so I could disappear.”Īfter leaving the army, he went to Paris with 100 francs in his pocket and enrolled in drama school. We were like sheep in the middle of dragons.” Luckily, he managed to get the ear of a superior in charge of the barracks’ entertainment programme, for whom he worked as a secretary. It was, he says: “Stupid, difficult, hard. Reno, right, with Jean-Marc Barr in The Big Blue (1988). Aged 17, after the death of his mother, he decided to go to France and, in order to get citizenship, did a year’s military service in Wittlich, Germany. He was born Juan Moreno y Herrera-Jiménez to Andalucían parents and spent his childhood in Casablanca, Morocco. Ironically for someone called on by Hollywood to embody Gallic savoir-faire, Reno isn’t even really French. I understand – they do not have time for sentiment.” “If you don’t follow the road they prepare for you, they change and take someone else. But he is relaxed about the reductive Hollywood thinking that often winds up slotting European heavyweights like him into such pantomime. It’s another notch for him in a run of Eurovillains that includes Rollerball, Alex Cross and, last year, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. He has a Yan Pei-Ming and a Pierre Soulages, but his fee for The Doorman didn’t stretch far enough for him to achieve “the dream” – a Magritte. “I like art, but only if I can look at it every day – that’s very important,” he says. He is an art-lover in real life, but is not, like his character, quite ready to kill for it. “Ruby! I liked her.” Reno commends her kick-ass capabilities, but barely lifts a finger himself, marshalling a band of mercenaries as they try to recover a cache of old masters. “Ruby,” I say, referring to his co-star Ruby Rose. “I liked the story, and then to do the villain again – why not? And the girl, what’s her name? I’m very bad with names. It’s serviceable fun, no more, and Reno doesn’t pretend otherwise. He fills the bad guy slot on The Doorman, a new Die Hard-cribbing martial arts film that sets an art heist within the confines of a New York hotel. Photograph: David Lee/NetflixĮven at this stage in his career, his name has enough currency to get him through Hollywood’s door. Reno, centre, in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. “Thinking about the past and ageing: What am I going to do? I’m old, I don’t have much time, and if the virus catches me, I’m dead.” “With the virus, everybody is making introspection,” he says, with philosophical Francophone syntax. But it hasn’t stopped the melancholia closing in. He has been busy during the pandemic, on a six-month filming stint in Vigo, Galicia on a Spanish-language detective series for Amazon. Yet here he is, caught at an extreme Dutch angle on my laptop screen, fuller-faced than back then, but otherwise hale. If you’re French, then he’s doubly part of the woodwork: in 1993, he played time-travelling knight Godefroy Amaury de Malfête in Les Visiteurs, a film that is a national institution. He already seemed timeless, providing grizzled, existentially marinated cool-for-hire in numerous Hollywood blockbusters. Maybe because he is fixed in our minds at the time he became world-famous in his mid-40s as a gauche hitman in Léon: The Professional, it is strange thinking of Jean Reno as the age he now is: 72.
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