Camille Cottin Faces the Future

In the global imagination, the Parisian woman is often (stereotypically) portrayed as a figure of studied composure (well-dressed and perpetually unimpressed, with a proclivity for withering observations), and few performers of the past decade have embodied her with as much widespread fanfare as Camille Cottin. In her star turn as Andréa Martel, the imperious senior agent at the heart of Fanny Herrero’s Call My Agent!, Cottin played a crucial role in turning a workplace comedy about the anxious hidden world of Parisian talent representation into an internationally franchised phenomenon. Its global reach and critical adoration have since transformed her, most recently by way of a high-profile ambassadorship with Dior, into something of an unofficial emissary of digital-age French culture itself. Cottin herself bears little resemblance to the character she embodied; where Andréa commanded (often with a chill) every room she entered, Cottin is warm to a fault, quick to laugh at her own expense, and inclined to expound upon her thought process as soon as she shares an opinion.

That deep contrast contributes a certain poignancy to her recent return to Call My Agent!. Earlier this fall, Cottin and her tribe of castmates returned for a feature-length reunion set five years after the conclusion of the original series in 2020 that existed chiefly because of Herrero, the series’ creator and, in Cottin’s words, “really the mother of the show.” “The fact that she was piloting and writing the movie was something that really gave us lots of faith and trust,” Cottin explains, “in the fact that we would be coming back and bringing our characters back together.” Rather than picking up the story in a scenario where no time had elapsed, the screenplay begins in the wreckage of the central firm’s bankruptcy and mines the interval as a source of narrative material. “[Herrero] wanted to include the fact that five years had gone,” Cottin notes, “and that all the characters would have been through those five years.” From Cottin’s view, the characters’ bond is less a matter of pure sentiment than a shared tolerance (if not desire for) co-dependent friction. They “fight, betray themselves—they are in competition—but in the end they end up as being a group together.” Aided largely by the pure chemistry of the ensemble cast, the series is in many ways a heartfelt story of people who cannot quite quit one another.

The show’s second life and rapid global appreciation, meanwhile, unfolded largely beyond Cottin’s awareness. Picking up significant steam during the pandemic when Netflix added its fourth season to its global roster, the show quickly amassed an audience far beyond the Francosphere. At the time, Cottin had just wrapped Stillwater under Tom McCarthy, opposite Matt Damon, only to watch its release postponed indefinitely—she spent lockdown in Normandy among a tight-knit crew of family and friends, unaware that audiences confined to their homes across the world had adopted her agency as a surrogate, found family. “I had no idea,” she readily admits. The sheer scale of the show’s newfound recognition, once it reached her orbit, broadened her professional trajectory in profound and tangible ways. “I think for all of us it made a change,” she remarks, and soon thereafter the gamut of offers available to her widened into English-language film and television of a variety rarely extended to French television actors.

In some respects, her affinity for global success was foretold by an unpredictable career built on an early life spent bridging cultures. Born in Boulogne-Billancourt before navigating her teenage years in London—where she acquired her sharp English that would later prove to be one of her most exportable assets—Cottin returned to Paris to train for the stage, supporting herself by teaching English at private schools. She concedes the vocation was ill-suited to her personal skillset and temperament: “I wish I can apologize to my poor, poor students,” she laughs. Her first memorable turn onstage came at seventeen while playing Helen of Troy, when her mother stepped in as Paris after a schoolboy abandoned the role due, of all things, to an abundance of homework. Cottin’s mom, “literally disguised” in “a ridiculous costume and a sailor hat,” took the stage opposite Cottin, the daughter “dying in [her] princess dress.”

Acting as a profession did not sustain her until her mid-twenties, and the French public did not learn her name at large until she was thirty-four, when Connasse, the Canal+ hidden-camera sketch series which later expanded into a feature and earned her a César nomination for Most Promising Actress, placed her, as a crudely and comically entitled Parisienne, before strangers who had no knowledge of their inclusion in the comedy. Her chief preoccupation was, tellingly, the welfare of the unknowing. “The hardest thing with Connasse was to make sure that I wouldn’t hurt the people that didn’t know they were involved in a comedy thing,” she asserts, and her solution was to push the character completely past plausibility, since “the crazier I was, the less harmed they would be, because they would immediately feel like I had a problem.” Call My Agent!’s Andréa, by contrast, provided a more joyful experience purely on the basis of her capabilities. “It’s always very inspiring for an actor to be embodying a character that you know yourself is wittier or sharper or stronger, or has more confidence,” she says. “Then it’s a pleasure to jump in her shoes.”

Now a fixture in the world of high fashion, Cottin is keenly aware of the close relationship between fashion and film, both among France’s most esteemed and longstanding creative traditions. “Fashion is an actor of the cinema industry,” she observes, noting that brands now help finance the films whose glamour they sustain while remaining “constantly inspired by historical movements, politics, social expressions.” It is a vantage sharpened by her Dior ambassadorship bridging the two industries—notably, she recently played a caricature of Dior creative director Jonathan Anderson for a short marketing skit produced by A24 announcing their ongoing partnership. Both industries, she suggests, are reckoning with their own conduct. French sets now require training against sexual violence and harassment, and “if you don’t do it, then you can’t be filming—for everyone,” while a recently and unanimously passed law, the loi intégrale, has strengthened how such violence (across all corners of French society) is detected, reported, and addressed legally. Much of the remaining resistance to reform, Cottin believes, is generational and affective: some older figures “don’t want you to touch their idols.”

Perhaps her most pressing concern lies with her son’s generation. “Being sixteen or seventeen and growing up in our world is bloody heavy and bloody terrifying,” she reflects, recalling a question he once put to her—“Do you think I’ll make it till I’m forty?”—prompted by the steepening climate crisis and global turmoil in the Trump era. She firmly supports the broadening student movement now filling French streets as a legitimate, arguably admirable, response: a structured and largely peaceful defense of the public school system she calls “the lungs of a society,” and she is quick to note how coverage, international and domestic, can distort the realities of a non-violent movement. “The media just put forward a lot of this,” she notes of the violence at its fringes. “You have a lot of people who are pacific, and who have a message—an articulate message.” She is aware of the role her celebrity plays in the perception of her message: “I’m not speaking as an actress. I’m just speaking as a person.”

Her philanthropy pulses through the same veins as her innate empathy and concern for those less privileged. “There are two organizations that I stand for and I deeply admire,” she proclaims, and both operate at the point where political abstraction and rhetoric harden into acute emergency. One organization, SOS Méditerranée, sends the Ocean Viking, a former oil industry support vessel repurposed into a rescue ship, out to meet migrants adrift in the Mediterranean fleeing persecution, poverty, and unending conflict. “They’re doing an amazing job,” she glows. Maison des Femmes (House of Women), a Saint Denis-based organization founded by gynecologist Dr. Ghada Hatem-Gantzer, extends help to women who have survived all forms of sexual and domestic violence—from female genital mutilation and domestic violence to sexual abuse and rape—as well as their children. Neither commitment is ornamental to Cottin. “Whenever I can do something for them, I do it.”

There is a clear throughline in our conversation: Cottin’s fixation on humanity, her curiosity for others, and her deeply tuned appreciation for their work and their well-being. For an actress whose most famous roles at times embody the coldest or crassest machina of human interaction, the contrast could not be starker. Cottin’s instincts run the other way, toward the strangers on the street she determined herself not to wound and the students whose voices she is resolved to amplify. Even the show that made her an international star rests on the same principle of conviviality—“the DNA of it is what it is to be an ensemble.”

Be the first to read this story and many more in print by preordering your copy of our twelfth issue here. Camille has selected SOS Méditerranée, which rescues people in distress in the Mediterranean Sea, as the recipient of proceeds from direct sales of this version of CERO 12.⁠