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In a small 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 The Taste of Things, 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, is based on the 1920 novel The Passionate Epicure and 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 in the interest of maintaining her personal freedom. It’s a lush, mouthwatering, often erotic visual feast, beginning with a carefully choreographed 30-minute cooking sequence. Eventually, it turns into a meditation on mortality, loss, and the difficulty of moving on, but it never loses its essential joie de vivre. It’s a story that is in some ways an alternate-dimension version of Binoche and Magimel’s own, and in talking about it, they dive into the history of their relationship. At times, Magimel seems taken aback by how personal our conversation gets, but Binoche is squarely in her comfort zone, directly addressing various conflicts they’ve had over the years and occasionally pausing in the middle of a sentence to tilt back her head and laugh. “Not to do therapy in front of a journalist,” she jokes at one point, before launching back into the debate.
When did you first become aware of one another? What had you seen of the other’s work?
Juliette Binoche: I’d seen Benoît in André Téchiné’s Les Voleurs. I was impressed by his freedom — how natural he was in front of the camera. I met him for the first time at a restaurant with the director of Les Enfants du Siècle. [Addressing Magimel] You put your cigarette in your mouth exactly the same way you did in the film. There was something sexy, at ease about it. I was wondering how it was going to be between us. I felt like he was quite impressed.
With you?
J.B.: Yes. Weren’t you impressed with me?
Benoît Magimel: Yes. Subconsciously, I was already in the film. I felt like I was passing a test. I was trying to have a big effect on her with the cigarette.
Did it work?
J.B.: It had some impact, I think.
When did you start to develop actual feelings for each other? Was it that early?
J.B.: On the first day of shooting, we were in the car and you took my hand. And it shocked me! I thought, Who does he think he is? So I started to put some distance between us.
B.M.: It was just a friendly thing. A way to get over the discomfort you can have on the first day. I think I was trying to break the ice, to say, “We can do this. We’re gonna do this film together.”
J.B.: And I took it personally.
Juliette, what did it look like to put some distance between you?
J.B.: I didn’t want to be hurt. It was as simple as that. I had a conversation with Benoît saying, “You know, we shouldn’t mix life and acting because it’s so confusing. And it can be very hurtful.” And then you took a lot of distance, but very obviously. You underlined the distance.
B.M.: I did. I remember it well. I hate when you think you’re the character you’re playing, and you use the role to play out a real love story. You get confused. I don’t like that — there’s no substance; it’s not solid. I always heard about that happening in cinema, and I was uncomfortable with it. So that wasn’t my goal at all. I’d have preferred for us to get together after the film. Falling for each other really came as a surprise.
When did you decide, Okay, screw it. Let’s do it?
J.B.: When he took an obvious distance with me, he made me feel that he didn’t want to have any relationship.
B.M.: I was ignoring her completely. I gave the rest of the crew lots of attention.
J.B.: I read so much into what he was doing. And then I thought, Okay, I’ve gotta go for it.
Was that your plan all along, Benoît?
B.M.: No, I just thought, Okay, I’ll stop being who I am, out of what I thought was generosity. I thought maybe we could be friends. That attraction between us was always there. It had a life of its own. You have to keep your emotions in check. So when she said, “Back off, honey!” — there’s nothing worse than hearing that. I was like, Okay, no problem. I’ll start ignoring you and I’ll seduce everybody else!
J.B.: So I called him. And I said, “I think I have feelings for you.” While we were still shooting.
What made you decide to do that?
J.B.: I just thought it was ridiculous. I could feel we had feelings for each other, and we needed to grow up and tell each other we wanted it.
B.M.: I said, “Okay, but not right away. We gotta wait.”
J.B.: He made me wait two days.
B.M.: I was afraid we’d be mixing everything up. But then there was a scene where the director, Diane, lost her shit, when she put us in a little corner — they didn’t have time to do a tracking shot, and it created tension. We were trying our best, but we couldn’t get the scene right.
J.B.: What scene was that?
B.M.: It was in Venice. You and I were thick as thieves, complicit, laughing a lot, and that upset her. She got mad at us because we couldn’t get it together.
In the movie, they’re having that same argument: Can we be together and also be artistic collaborators? They try to resist each other for half the movie until they finally get together. Was the metatextual experience something you talked about?
J.B.: I didn’t think of that at the time. Maybe unconsciously it came into my mind. But as actors, you’re always playing so many stories. It does seem like we were meant to meet. Because we do have this big age difference.
B.M.: Not that big! No, we were just living life, I think. The film was becoming secondary to me.
Juliette, did you feel that way too?
B.M.: No. She’s work, work, work.
J.B.: You have to give your best for the best film.
B.M.: Doesn’t mean that you can’t also live life. You breathe when you wrap the film, but you have to keep breathing during it, too.
J.B.: I remember something that really touched me. Every Friday night, the production was doing feasts and parties. I was dancing, and there was an older man who was kind of weird. He wasn’t from the shoot; I wonder if he was homeless. He always wanted to dance with me, and I wanted to be nice, so I’d dance once and then again. And you came to save me. And we were not together yet. You took me away from this person, and we started dancing.
B.M.: Nobody else stepped in?
J.B.: Nobody else tried to help me with this situation. I was very touched because it felt like you were protecting me. You came not as a seductor but as a protector.
What was the experience of acting opposite each other once you’d decided to be together? Was it easier or more difficult?
J.B.: The only thing is in intimate scenes; when you’re with each other, it feels too intimate. You don’t want to show this real intimacy because it feels not in the right spot. It’s freer when you’re not in a relationship. Because you’re not feeling you’re showing that intimacy to the camera.
B.M.: I agree.
There’s that old idea that actors have more chemistry and tension if they don’t actually get together. Do you buy into that?
J.B.: Actors re-create life. That’s what we’re here for. So it helps when you have somebody you can work with. At the beginning, you were quite competitive with me. Do you remember that?
B.M.: Not at all.
J.B.: I thought you were a bit starletlike. You were afraid you weren’t getting in the shot.
B.M.: I was a total gentleman! I would always go and see the camera line and say, “Is everything okay? I’m not hiding her? Is the lighting good?”
J.B.: Really? I didn’t know that.
B.M.: On the other hand, I did do a lot of gesticulating. Maybe that’s what you thought was me trying to ham it up. I really didn’t mean to get in your way. We both had the main roles, so we both had to jockey for space.
What else stands out from that shoot to you?
B.M.: For me, the film was very important. It was my first lead role with Juliette, a big production. I wanted to make sure the film was good. That’s what we were mostly thinking about. We were still wondering what we would become as a couple, but we never stopped feeling responsible for the quality of the film. I had such a great time making it. I have a tenderness for these characters. For Musset, he never really got over her and he never wrote so well after that. The big question is, Do you have to suffer to write well? Do you have to suffer to act well?
What do you both think?
J.B.: The experience of life gives you this dying feeling because you have to let go of a lot of values you have. In acting, in order to become something real and profound, something needs to die in you. That’s why I often experience depression when I go back to life. Because you have a perspective that’s different. Your ego isn’t going, “I’m the most this, I’m the most that.” You know what it is to lose, to not know, to be lost. That gives you power in the moment of acting, which is about being present. It’s true to your heart and can be sensual in a way.
B.M.: Life experience is what nourishes an actor. Through living, you understand certain things. Our daughter, Hana, wanted to play Hamlet at acting school as a teenager, and I said, “No, maybe you should start with Musset’s Don’t Play With Love, something you understand.” The role of Musset came to me at a time in my life when I could really resonate with it. I was struck by that. There’s no such thing as chance; the roles you get are not by accident. How can the director know you’re going through the exact thing the character is going through? Sometimes you just say, Wow, this is crazy. How could they sense that?
So you think you were fated to be in this movie, to meet in this way?
J.B.: It’s a choice, but at the same time, it’s encountering what you’re supposed to do. Destiny, but a choice of that destiny. It’s like having a child together. When I proposed it to you, you said “yes” immediately. It needed to be done.
You proposed having a child together?
J.B.: It was not an idea. It was a feeling.
How long had you been together?
J.B.: Five, six months? I was driving in a yellow car, and we were just about to come to a red light. We passed a friend’s place, and I said, “I’d like to have a child with you.” I asked you if you agreed, and you said “yes.”
And how long after that were you pregnant?
J.B.: [Snaps her fingers.] Benoît came with a suitcase two weeks after the end of the shooting. I was living in Vaucresson, 20 minutes outside of Paris. When we started living together, he really took care of my son [Raphaël, who was 6 at the time and whose father is Binoche’s ex André Hallé] in the most beautiful way. Like a father. That’s why I wanted to have a child with him, because I saw how wonderful he was with children. When you see a man taking care, really getting involved in a family that’s already done, it’s overwhelming.
B.M.: We had the same first name in our minds for our child — Hana — without knowing it. These things seem to be written. That’s how I simplify life.
How did you balance being busy working actors while raising a family?
B.M.: It’s complicated to have a stable life when you’re an actor. You have to make choices. The hardest thing is to stay present, because you can’t replace your absences.
J.B.: One of the painful turning points in our relationship was when I wanted to do theater in New York on Broadway. As an actress, it’s quite amazing, and I’m a theater actress to start with. Benoît thought I shouldn’t do it, and I wanted to do it. That separated us, really. Benoît felt abandoned, and I felt abandoned as well, because he wouldn’t understand why I needed it and come along. That’s where we started to wobble.
It’s been about 20 years since your breakup. Which is another interesting parallel, because in The Taste of Things, Dodin and Eugénie have been together for about 20 years.
J.B.: But the thing is most of the time we didn’t speak much. I was trying to get ahold of Benoît more than he tried to get ahold of me. Because of having the responsibility of a child — you can imagine how much weight it has, and there’s the desire to connect. That’s why starting on the set together for The Taste of Things was very moving for us.
B.M.: You were at the origin of this film project.
J.B.: I read it a year and a half before he came on, and there was already an actor that was supposed to do it. That actor dropped out, and then we asked another actor, who said “yes,” then also dropped out like three months before we started shooting.
That’s bad.
J.B.: It’s horrible! Then Hùng said, “Can I give Benoît the script?” I think he’d already given the script to Benoît, but he wanted to see how I would react. I said, “Yes, of course, but I don’t think he’s going to say ‘yes.’” And he did. He saved the film.
B.M.: Cooking was always a thing between us. We seduce the person we love by making nice dishes for them. It’s something that really spoke to me — it was meant to be. When I read the script, I cried. You always wonder when you enter a relationship with someone, How can it last? That’s what this movie is about. It’s so modern. This woman is afraid of breaking the magic by getting married.
The film is incredibly moving. I think I cried through half of it, too. Can you speak a bit about the differences you saw in each other as actors, process-wise, all these years later?
J.B.: For me, the magic of the film was to be able to share present time together through what the characters were going through. Knowing they were in a long-lasting relationship, and that we didn’t have that … I was already moved by that.
So it was sort of a fantasy version of what might have happened?
J.B.: Yes. When you believe in it, it becomes real in your mind, in your body, in your heart. Scientifically, they’ve done research that shows your body believes what you believe. For me, there was also the frustration of not having been able to talk to Benoît. We weren’t succeeding in the separation, which for me means you’re able to speak, to gather once in a while. Especially when you have a child. I was frustrated and a little hurt by not being able to accomplish that. So finally being in Benoît’s presence every day, even though it was less than four weeks, was a lot to me. I thought it was a way for our daughter to see that we can get along, that we can express feelings, even though it’s a film and it’s not our words. It felt genuinely real even though it was re-created for the film.
I asked Hana two days after she saw the film, “How did you feel watching your parents play together? Was it healing?” And she said, “Yes. Totally.” But just after she watched the film, she was overwhelmed. She hid in the restroom. I went to her and took her in my arms and she was crying, saying, “I didn’t know it was going to be so upsetting.” And we cried together.
B.M.: I never wanted my daughter to see my films, actually. And we haven’t spoken about it. When she was little, I was always afraid I would take up too much space. We already take up so much space as far as who we are, being public figures. And we talk a lot about ourselves. To see the film is one more thing. If she wants to see it, great. If she wants to talk about it, great. But of course I can only imagine for her, seeing her parents, must be something …
When did you realize she also wanted to be an actor?
J.B.: Early on. There was something natural in her wanting to be an actress. Exposing yourself that much can be overwhelming, so she wanted to try other things, and she did eventually go to school for editing. She’s now writing her own films.
B.M.: I was against her being an actor because everybody around her was like, “You’ve gotta be an actress!” There’s pressure, having parents like us. But today, now, what she’s doing — writing some scripts, doing some editing, she wants to be a director — I think that’s great. She’s finding herself in there. She needs to find her own path.
J.B.: But at the same time, it’s important to face the fear of having well-known parents. It was important for her to have the courage to do it. Because you put yourself on the side, thinking, I have such well-known parents I’m not going to try. But you have to go for it to know if you want to do it or not. My parents were actors as well. I didn’t say, “Oh, will I be able to?” I was like, “Fuck it! I’m gonna do it!” You see what I’m saying? It gives you more strength.
B.M.: That’s your story. Not hers.
J.B.: But it’s amazing that she was brave enough to say, “Yeah, I’m gonna try!”
B.M.: You became an actress because it was down in your guts. If she hadn’t had two parents like us —
J.B.: I really believe she did it because she wanted to get inside of herself. To see if she was brave enough to do it. I believe she wanted to do Hamlet because there’s a strong connection she feels with this character.
B.M.: You can’t have an 18-year-old kid play Hamlet. She did it because she wanted to get closer to you. Closer to her parents.
J.B.: No! There’s something about Hamlet that speaks to her. It’s to do with the relationship to the father, to death. I never said anything about Hamlet to her. She’s the one who wanted to do it.
B.M.: It’s because she wanted to impress you. I asked her about the auditions, and she said she felt sick for three weeks. I said, “Then you mustn’t. If you do it, it’ll make you feel bad.”
J.B.: You don’t act to feel good!
B.M.: No, but she wasn’t connected to it.
J.B.: She’s different, that’s true.
B.M.: She’s fearful. Take you. The desire to be an actor needs to come from deep down inside. You were born for it; there was no question. Not many trajectories are like yours. You did it out of necessity.
J.B.: Out of joy! Hana wanted that joy! She wanted to experiment with that.
B.M.: And she realized it was not a joy.
J.B.: Yes and no. You have to enter into a certain form of pain, but then it becomes joy. Acting is about that transformation.
B.M.: She’s not cut out for it. When you tell her, “You gotta be into it” … It was too soon for her; she wanted something she wasn’t ready for.
J.B.: You need to ask her again now, today. “Was it too soon or not?” I’m not sure she’d say it was. That’s how you grow up. And she wanted it! I’m telling you. You know how stubborn she is. Are you going to smoke a cigarette now? [Laughs.]
[Magimel goes to the doorway to smoke, hanging the cigarette out the door with one hand as they argue for the next 15 minutes.]
I love to hear a debate about art.
J.B.: Yeah, it’s about art — and trusting your child! Trusting the strength you have. But he thinks he needed to protect her. Not that I don’t want to protect her. But she wanted to do it so fiercely. There was no way I was going to stop her.
So did she do Hamlet?
J.B.: Yeah! She came back and had a big awareness of who her parents were. And her need for art became bigger.
Was this the conversation you had at the time about it?
J.B.: No, because he didn’t want to speak too much.
I’m getting a good sense of what kind of experience Hana must have had with both of you as her parents. There’s a big philosophical difference, but you’re also sort of saying the same thing in different ways. Did making the film together allow you to have conversations you previously weren’t able to?
J.B.: No, because we were concentrating on making the film! And also because we didn’t speak that much for a long time. So I was cautious about what subject matters we were going to talk about.
B.M.: I’d decided to set this discussion aside. We have some different points of view. But that’s a good thing, too.
So this is the first time you’ve talked about it?
B.M.: We talked about it a bit.
J.B.: Not that much, though. Because he was upset and I didn’t know how to deal with it.
B.M.: We can talk about everything, of course, but as you can see it requires energy. It’s demanding.
J.B.: I miss the conversations.
B.M.: I miss it, too.
J.B.: But at the same time, it’s not easy.
B.M.: At least we have a daughter we’re very proud of. That’s the most important thing.
How has your dynamic shifted after making this film? Do you feel closer?
B.M.: Yes, it’s been very positive. It seems like everyone else is more interested in what it was like for us to get back together again than we are. For me it felt very natural. We know each other well. And there was a modesty between us, too.
J.B.: We did have a certain modesty or reserve between us. It helped to create the timeless feeling in the relationship they had.
Do you think you’ll work together again?
B.M.: We need to do it again. And not wait as long this time.
J.B.: Maybe not when I’m 80. [Laughs.]
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