There are few actresses as fearless as Léa Seydoux.
She anchored controversial 2017 Cannes-winner “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” appeared in David Cronenberg’s abrasive “Crimes of the Future” and popped in for a pair of Wes Anderson wonders (“The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The French Dispatch”), while also co-starring in giant Hollywood blockbusters – a “Dune” movie (“Dune: Part Two”), two 007 movies (“Spectre” and “No Time to Die”) and “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.”
At this year’s Toronto Film Festival she stars in “Gentle Monster,” a hot-button drama that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will be on Netflix later this year. In the film, Seydoux plays an experimental musician married to filmmaker (Laurence Rupp), who, following a psychological episode, relocates from Munich to the countryside.
“But their bucolic idyll collapses when a sex crimes unit, led by officer Else Kühn (Jella Haase), arrives to seize the family’s digital devices — and to arrest Philip. As the case against him becomes increasingly difficult to deny, her attention shifts to her son Johnny — and the terrifying possibility that he might be involved,” reads the official TIFF program.
Seydoux told Jada Yuan at TheWrap’s studio at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival that she was actually worried she might not get the role – not because she was anxious about the subject matter but because she had trouble scheduling a meeting with her writer-director Marie Kreutzer.
“I was like, she will never hire me for this movie because I’m always postponing the call. You were very relaxed on the Zoom, and I was surprised because sometimes directors can be nervous because your movie is a baby that you cherish,” she said.
There are some nude scenes in “Gentle Monster” and Seydoux said they spoke about what that would look like, as Seydoux told the director she’d just had a baby and was in “a certain shape.”
“I thought it was good to show a real body. You remember we spoke about this. It’s also something that I like in the film I have to say now – this intimacy of this couple that is shown, and it makes it even more tragic because they are really relatable,” Seydoux said.
The normalcy of their relationship, Seydoux said, helps to demystify what a pedophile is.
“Sometimes you imagine the guy behind the bush. It’s not that. It can happen to anyone. And the way Marie wrote the script, I thought was very subtle, also because of that, because we understand the complexity of this woman who’s facing this situation, and she’s pulled apart between different feelings,” said Seydoux. “She’s always fighting against contradictory emotions, and that I thought was extremely interesting.”
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