Tall, dork and handsome … Louis Garrel. Photograph: WWD/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Tall, dork and handsome … Louis Garrel. Photograph: WWD/Getty Images Film Interview ‘I don’t care if I look good’: French heartthrob Louis Garrel on fashion, fatherhood and his radically dorky new role Philip Oltermann The star has long been French cinema’s favourite tousle-haired Adonis, which makes his latest performance – as a schlubby, stay-at-home dad – all the more surprising. ‘I appreciate people laughing at me,’ he says
Fri 28 Aug 2026 14.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google ‘E ven though I’ve been working in film for over 20 years, I still have this desire to look beautiful on screen,” says Louis Garrel, on a video call from his bed inside a boat off the coast of Corsica. The French film star is lying on his stomach, occasionally kicking up his bare legs, ruffling his curls and running the nail of his thumb over his moustache. I think the person he sees on the laptop screen in front of him is me, but I am pretty certain he is flirting with his own reflection.
The attraction between the Paris-born 43-year-old and the camera tends to be reciprocal. Long of limb, tousled of hair and chiselled of nose, Garrel has spent a career on screen as French cinema’s favourite Adonis – the man film-makers turn to when they need an erotic wrecking ball to smash up bourgeois twosomes and turn them into quivering menages a trois.
His breakout role in 2003 was as a priapic student revolutionary who inserts himself in the sexual bond between his twin sister (Eva Green) and a visiting American student (Michael Pitt) in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers . Since then, he’s been reliably effective as smouldering sexpots whose intense stare cuts across dancefloors – bewitching two friends in Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s 2010 film Heartbeats , enticing Angelina Jolie into a fling in high-fashion drama Couture, or hawkishly pouncing on the poor Yves Saint Laurent in the 2014 biopic Saint Laurent, where he played Karl Lagerfeld’s dandy companion Jacques de Bascher. “I fight against it because I know that good actors don’t care about looking good,” he excuses himself. “But I’m not such a good actor.”
View image in fullscreen Uptown hunk … Garrel in Just an Illusion. Photograph: Manuel Moutier That is false modesty of the highest order. He hails from a dynasty of actor-film-makers that includes his mother Brigitte Sy, father (and ex-lover of Velvet Underground singer Nico) Philippe Garrel and grandfather Maurice Garrel, on whose advice he applied to and graduated from Paris’s prestigious Conservatoire drama school. On screen, he has not just impersonated dreamboats but also Alfred Dreyfus, King Louis XIII, Robespierre and Jean-Luc Godard. And in his latest film, Garrel does something that only good actors can do: to play magnificently against type.
In the comedy Just an Illusion, he is Yves, a former executive at a kitchen appliance firm who has recently lost his job but can’t bring himself to tell his family. Befitting the film’s 80s suburban Paris setting, Garrel’s hair here is bouffy rather than tousled, the moustache more Ron Burgundy than The Leopard-era Alain Delon. He wears a billowing beige trenchcoat that makes him look as befuddled as Monsieur Hulot, the comical everyman in the films of Jacques Tati.
In one scene, Yves is flicking through a magazine on the living room sofa while their apartment block’s caretaker Monsieur Berger (Pierre L…