Clemence Poesy

[jacquelyn paige]

'Birdsong' Clémence Poésy interview: 'I'm not at all like Isabelle'

If you've read the Sebastian Faulks novel Birdsong - and it seems most people have - then you'll be very excited about BBC One's brand new adaptation starting this weekend!

We've already brought you an interview with star Eddie Redmayne, but we also caught up with the beautiful Clémence Poésy when she chatted to reporters about playing Isabelle.

Read on to find out what she had to say about Eddie, sex scenes and why she's glad she didn't meet Faulks on set...

Were you already a fan of the book when you signed up for Birdsong?
"No, it's not as famous in France as it is in England. The minute I started talking about it with my English friends, they were completely obsessed with the book and thrilled that I was doing it. But I had no idea it was such a big [thing]. It's one of those modern classics, isn't it - it's those things that everyone's read that came out not that long ago. So I read the book before I started."

What did you think of the book? Did you see why everyone loved it?
"Yeah. I think it's a brilliant story about the two extremes of life - love or passion is life at its peak and then death at its peak. I think it's just a book that explores such extremes and describes them so beautifully and so truthfully. And also I feel like it's talking about characters that are very modern. It's not looking at them from afar, it's with them and you don't feel like you're in a period drama, so that's what we try to do filming it too."

Did you feel under any pressure since it's such a well-loved book and people might have their own ideas about the characters and so on?
"Well, I don't know. I think you can't make anything good with too much pressure. Right before that I'd done a film about Joan of Arc and it was the same kind of thing. It's this character that's been played so many times and everyone's got their idea of who she is and if you're too scared and if you're wondering about what it should be you never make it what it should be. Actually you just have to at some point know that someone is trusting you with it and try to make it your own.

"But I have huge respect for that character. I really loved how that passion sets her free and makes her someone who's not just someone's wife or someone's lover. She's her own person."

How did you get on with Eddie?
"Ahh, hmm. You know, he's not very nice. No, he's lovely! Everyone's going to tell you that. He's the loveliest, most generous, gentle... he's so genuinely interested in everyone, making everyone feel really special. Everyone just wants to talk to Eddie - when he shows up on set you kind of feel a general movement [towards him]! He's great, he's got everything, that guy. It's a bit annoying really."

Isabelle is in an unhappy, violent marriage, but what is it about Stephen that draws her to him?
"I think he listens to her. I think for the first time she's got someone treating her as an equal. And I also think there's just a very sexual chemistry that's kind of hard to explain. I think love can take various forms but that one is for me mostly a very strong sexual connection between two people and the sense of freedom that it brings in her life.

"It's probably the first time she's having any sexual connection with anyone. Her life with her husband is quite miserable. I think women have that at some point in their life, they have that thing that makes them feel like a woman, and that's probably what Isabelle goes through with Stephen. And then he looks like Eddie Redmayne!"

Do you believe that there's one great passion that liberates you?
"I think the people we meet in life and the loves of our lives are very, very important in what we become, like change us - when it's right probably change us for the best. But no, I don't know. I mean, it's not like a rule. I think some people experiment and she definitely experiments with Stephen and then goes on to be, after she leaves him, probably a very different woman than she was before she met him."

Do you think she changes him as well?
"Yeah. Probably not in the same way. He's changed by her and by that experience in a different way. Stephen's character's a beautiful, beautiful character because he's changed deeply by love and by life but he's also changed deeply by death and by what he experiences in the trenches.

"But there was one scene that Eddie and I freaked out about for a long, long time which is a scene where they see each other at the very end of their story. What was extremely weird for me was that I arrived on set when they had finished with all the war bit. It was like everyone was doing a different film, which was a love story, and Eddie showed up and he was bringing the war with him.

"It was very, very impressive because all of a sudden I was looking at this person that I'd been acting with for a few weeks and he wasn't himself anymore, it was someone else. He'd become that soldier and he was bringing something into the room which was like a third character, which was the war.

"I think he's changed by her but he's made a completely different man from seeing people dying and what man can do to each other. It's seeing how passion can destroy and how hatred can destroy. It's kind of positive at the end, it gets nicer!"

How did you find the love scenes? Were they easy because they were with Eddie?
"Well, it's easier because it's Eddie Redmayne but it doesn't make it easy. What was great is that it was - this is going to sound stupid - it was a team effort. We were trying to get them right. We didn't avoid the subject. Because we knew it was such a big thing in the story.

"We took the time, we insisted on keeping proper time to shoot them even though no-one ever wants to spend that much time doing it because you kind of feel really silly and stupid. But hopefully they're OK. There are many. I remember on one day feeling something which I haven't felt for a long time which is being completely scared before a scene, being like, 'Oh my God, oh my God, I've got to dive in'. And it's good, it means that it wasn't just the regular sex scene that you have in every film. I think it was asking something more of us, which is hard to give to someone because it's very intimate, but I think it's one of the keys of their story."

Were there any other scenes you were worried about?
"That last scene. And then, no. Those sex scenes I was quite worried about, but it's not out of being prudish. It's just because you want to get them right and we knew it was going to be difficult. But difficult is good, I think. I think it's good to go where it's not easy."

Do you think you're similar to Isabelle?
"No! She's got a very, very different life than I do. I have no idea what it's like to be married to someone you don't love and to be the stepmother of two kids when you're that young and to then meet someone who you know you're not allowed to love but you love anyway.

"I feel so lucky that I live in a society that lets women be. I think that's the one of the biggest fights to keep having, is to fight for women to have the right to live their life the way they want to live it. So I can try and understand her as much as I can but no, I don't think we're similar."

Did you get to meet Sebastian Faulks?
"No. No, I would have been terrified! It's always really scary when the author comes on set. I think he was on set during the trenches. He didn't come out for our bit. But I'd love to meet him now that it's done and there's nothing he can do. He can't fire me anymore! He can't be like, 'Not her!'"

digitalspy

 

[jacquelyn paige]

Clémence Poésy on Birdsong... From The Telegraph
Thoughtful and beautiful, the actress Clémence Poésy is the quintessential Frenchwoman – making her the perfect muse for Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, and the perfect heroine of the BBC drama Birdsong. Stella magazine meets une femme sérieuse

In a slightly sad trailer-cum-caravan in a woodland park on the outskirts of Budapest, Clémence Poésy wrinkles her nose. 'There’s a weird smell,’ puzzles the 29-year-old French actress in her nigh-on perfect English. 'Or is that just me?’

It could indeed – and I mean this in the politest possible sense – be her. On this rainy summer’s day on the set of the BBC drama Birdsong, Poésy is dressed in a beautiful, floor-length cream gown.

At almost 100 years old and sourced in Paris, it’s not so much vintage as archaeological. It is also spot-on for the role Poésy is playing: Isabelle Azaire, a refined French gentlewoman of Amiens in 1910.

The mud, blood and horror of the First World War forms the other narrative half of this two-part, three-hour adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel about a war-torn romance.

Poésy is most often recognised for playing Fleur Delacour in three Harry Potter films, and for her role in the thriller In Bruges, opposite Colin Farrell, but she retains a very French love of high culture.

Her mother, a teacher, and her father, a theatre director, immersed her and her younger sister, Maëlle (also an actress), in the arts from an early age.
'They’ve always taught us to choose what we were going to see – hence no TV at home when we were kids. Because TV imposes something on you.’

She squirms when I mention her brief role in the dizzy Manhattan series Gossip Girl.

She’d just finished filming Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours – about a hiker who hacks off his own arm – and was about to start shooting Jeanne captive, in which she plays Joan of Arc, stripped by English soldiers and burnt at the stake.

She thought, 'It’s going to be nice to have something light in between… But sometimes you take decisions and then you’re like, what?’ Her voice drops away. 'I just wondered why I was there. I should have thought it through a bit before.’

But all that’s a long way from the trauma of Birdsong. Poésy adopts a graceful, pensive pose as she considers her character.

'I think Isabelle tries – probably because she lacks something in her life, she’s not very happy – to make everything very beautiful. She has a sense of aesthetic.

'There’s a quote from the novel that says she gave off the sense of “having not merely dressed, but dressed up, as though in a costume that suited not the house but some other world she inhabited in her mind”. That was a good note on [how to play] her.’

Birdsong tells the story of Isabelle Azaire and Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman who visits prewar Amiens to study the local textile trade.
He begins an intense affair with Isabelle, the much younger wife of the upper-middle-class merchant who is his host.

Flash forward six years to the carnage of the Somme battlefields, and a battle-scarred Captain Wraysford – played by Eddie Redmayne (who recently starred opposite Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn) – is haunted by memories of their illicit, intoxicating, maddening romance.

Poésy, an established star in France, is conscious of the high regard in which Birdsong is held in Britain and the need to do justice to Isabelle.

'That kind of passion can all of a sudden make you feel as if you’ve had no idea who you were for a very long time.

'Isabelle experiences that, then experiences something else when she decides to go away with someone that she realises she doesn’t know at all, once they’re on their own and nothing is forbidden anymore.’

In Faulks’s book many of the highly charged scenes of Isabelle and Stephen’s courtship involve a lot of graphically described oral sex.

For cast and crew, these scenes were something of a sticky subject. Out on set later, I gingerly broach the subject with Redmayne.

He smiles before turning and shouting across a gaggle, 'Clémence! Do you think I’m allowed to talk about our clever technique for the sex scene? Have you revealed?’

She shouts back something I can’t hear. But Redmayne, turning back to me, says, 'We found cunning ways that involved Haribo cherries being stuck on to Clémence’s thigh… but I don’t want that to ruin the moment!’ he says with a grin.

Poésy, who manages to combine radiance with froideur, had plenty of period-drama experience on which to draw, including playing Mary, Queen of Scots in Gunpowder, Treason & Plot and Queen Isabella in Richard II, which will be shown as part of a BBC Shakespeare season later this year.

'Taking the corset off is a big thing. I think there’s something very sexual about opening up a corset. Because it’s allowing someone to be… free in a way.’

That aside, 'When you take it off and put your jeans on you’re like, “Oh, my God, I’m so lucky that I live in a time where I don't have to wear this!”’
Three months later, in the drawing-room of a boutique hotel in east London, I meet Poésy again. She’s dressed down in black – jeans, sloppy jumper – but she still looks effortlessly cool.

At last autumn’s Chanel catwalk show in the French capital she was a front-row paparazzi magnet.

'Weird,’ she says, abashed at being afforded such style kudos. 'I was actually wearing a dress that had been worn before [by Saoirse Ronan, the teenage Irish star of Hanna]. I just loved the dress. And I don’t think Saoirse gave a s—.

'I never hire a stylist,’ she adds. As well as being a fashion pin-up, Poésy is a musician (she plays guitar and sang on last year’s debut album by the Arctic Monkeys associate Miles Kane) and keen artist (she has illustrated her own children’s story).

Since completing work on Birdsong in the summer, she’s filmed Mr Morgan’s Last Love with Michael Caine and signed a contract with the denim brand G-Star to be one of its new faces.

As with her previous fashion projects – a perfume campaign with Chloé and 'muse’ status for Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel and Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga – Poésy did not want to be just the girl in the picture.
'You need to be in a mindset that allows you to give something, otherwise it’s really boring,’ she says, tutting. 'It just becomes about being a clothes hanger, a living puppet.

'I knew fashion was going to be part of my job, so I thought I might as well have fun with it. I didn’t want people to decide what I was going to wear and what I was going to look like and how I should behave.

'Because that can happen really quickly in fashion if you don’t show that you know your stuff.

'I knew a bit about what Coco Chanel had done for women,’ she continues. 'She’s a very interesting character.

'And, with Nicolas, I’d seen his work from the beginning in magazines, so I knew what I was getting myself into. He’s a very easy man to talk to.’
When I ask her about men in her private life, though, she politely replies: 'Oh, I never talk about that. Ever.’

Just after the New Year I speak to Abi Morgan, who adapted Birdsong for the screen and wrote both the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady, and the Oscar-tipped Shame, starring Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan.

'Clémence has a wonderful containment, which really suits Isabelle’s character,’ she says. 'She’s a very sophisticated actress for someone so young.’

That’s a quality that works for Poésy behind the scenes, too. She has a clause in all her contracts that states that, if she ever does a nude scene, it can’t be used in trailers or publicity stills, only in the finished film.

It’s a product of her experience as a teenager making a film for which she was persuaded to go topless. Naked images of her duly wound up all over the place.Of course it could happen again.

'People can still find the scene and do whatever they want on the internet,’ she says. 'But at least you know they can’t f—ing use it on the trailer.
'I mean, who the f— is at ease with their body when they’re 18?’ she says, still angry. 'You’re not free at all; you’re just doing it because you’ve been told to do it. And I hate that.

'And it’s something that happens to every actress – and not every actor.’
The nudity in Birdsong, though, was a different matter. 'I think it’s a very sexual story. It’s more a sex story, or a passion story, than a love story.
'There was no moment where I was questioning the fact that we were going to have to show something, because that’s what happens in life. But you have to go into it understanding and being at ease with it.

'What I hate is seeing an 18-year-old being forced to do it, when it’s very clear that she has no idea why she’s doing it. And it doesn’t bring anything to the story.’

Of her topless scenes as a teenager, she adds, 'I just think I could have kept my bra on, and it would have been the same thing.’

Her experience making Mr Morgan’s Last Love, which she finished just before Christmas, was a wholly different experience. She and Michael Caine 'laughed a lot.

'He’s kept a playfulness we should all have, and getting to watch him work every day for two months was the best acting lesson I ever got.’

Mr Morgan lives in Paris, 'has lost his wife, and doesn’t speak a word of French – then he meets this girl, me. It’s two lonely people meeting each other. What does she do? She takes care of other people but is incapable of taking care of herself.’

Is that anything like Poésy?

She smiles. 'Ah, no. I’m quite good at taking care of myself.’

I don’t doubt it for a second.

telegraph

 

[jacquelyn paige]

Video interview from the Rodeo Drive G-Star Raw Event.
http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/article/TMG9025546/Clemence-Poesy-a-G-Star-is-born.html

 

[Bellechloe]

bangs? hmm

 

[wild roses]

That Glamour ed is amazing!

 

[myown]

i dont like the bangs.

same here. i liked her messy hair without the bangs alot.

 

[Dora]

Actress Clemence Poesy is sighted leaving the Chanel Haute-Couture Spring / Summer 2012 Show as part of Paris Fashion Week at Grand Palais on January 24, 2012 in Paris, France.

gettyimages.com

 

[biba91]

I love the bangs! She looks amazing in Birdsong, although it's really weird hearing her British accent

 

[Dora]

glamour.com

 

[Boomer]

The bangs are very adorable-young-French-girl appropriate!!

 

[jacquelyn paige]

I love what she wore to Chanel, especially that she chose a red clutch. It was the perfect touch of color.

 

[Alvedansen]

HQs


MQs

clemence-poesy.org

 

[Alvedansen]

LQs

clemence-poesy.org

 

[Boomer]

^ So cute- she looks like she's about 14 years old !!

 

[myown]

she looks great!

 

[MayaStar]

love the new hair!

 

[PetitPuppy]

Where can I get these boots? Does anybody know?

 

[XxpinktinksxX]

She looks adorable. The new hair suits her so well.

 

[Melly5525]

She is the perfect example of the modern Chanel cool girl, the jacket is gorgeous and love the red clutch, and her hair looks fantastic

 

[Janine]

Her look at Chanel is just gorgeous!
Love the boots. Hope we can get an ID for those.