Though one of France’s most acclaimed actors working today, when sitting down to speak to Lambert Wilson, you could be fooled into think he’s from Britain, such is the accent in which he speaks; articulate and pronounced, confident in the English language. And yet in spite of that the actor still harbours little desire to move to the States and make movies for there, for in Wilson’s eyes – there’s no future for French actors in Hollywood.

Promoting his new film The Odyssey, where Wilson plays the esteemed explorer and filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau – we had the pleasure of meeting him in Paris earlier in the year, as he speaks in-depth about the man he is inhabiting – and how he even sought advice from the subject, beyond the grave.

When offered a role of this nature – do you hesitate, or accept straight away?

My choices are always dictated by some sort of unconsciousness. Some sort of madness. So I said yes straight away. Before I had even met Jerome I said yes, but then I knew I had to meet him which was potentially problematic because sometimes a director can be disappointed when they meet you. The best thing is not to see them, to get the offer and sign on. Sometimes when you give them time to think, they change their mind. I thought, in my usual negative manner, they’d meet me and then propose it to someone else. Then I thought, no, I can pull it off, I can lose weight, I have the nose, I can be long and thin like him, and that was it. I didn’t know much about Cousteau at all, I was just raised with his films since I was a little boy, and he was this ideal grandfather figure, but I didn’t know anything about his life. I knew he had lost his son, so I knew there was drama there worthy of a feature film. Then I met Jerome and it was fabulous because for all his capacity to direct big action movies, he’s a very subtle, deep man, and very well-educated, but he hasn’t had classic training. He’s an intellectual who can direct action movies, so we started really discussing what was at stake which a character like Cousteau, and also how to reduce such a long life into a two hour long movie. The good thing is, he didn’t like the idea of a biopic, the film is about a father and son relationship, that’s what the film is about. It surprised people here, the Cousteau fans were really waiting for a big epic film, and enable the audience to relive those great moments of adventure, so they were taken aback by the choice of having the father-son relationship be the core, and also the portrayal of Cousteau, who was clearly a multi-faceted, if not ambiguous.

It’s not only a father-son relationship we explore, but a father-son relationship when the father is extremely famous. Could you relate to that?

Of course I completely related to that, because there are so many similarities between my family story and the family Cousteau. First of all, I have a brother and we have more or less the same age difference that the Cousteau brothers had. Our father’s were both in the dictionary, which does something to your brain in a way. You can boast in the classroom that your father is in the dictionary. When we were little, exactly the same thing happened. The Cousteau kids didn’t go to school before they were eight, they didn’t know how to read before they were eight. They were diving with their parents and going on local expeditions. Then they go Calypso and they abandoned the kids. I didn’t have the exact same upbringing, but we had a great time with my dad in the summer and both entities of brothers received the same sort of magic of philosophy, the same values; the beauty of the world, freedom, unconventional choices, because of course Cousteau, although a former army man, like my dad he had a very strong sense of originality, freedom. Those we received at a very early age. And then cut to our adolescence and not being taken care of. Suddenly being a young man trying to enter the same activity, and that’s when it became really brutal, both with my dad with Cousteau, because after having given us this sensation of excellence and freedom and a love of nature, then you have to compete with your dad, and find your own space, and it’s a deadly combat, because it’s a fight for supremacy. It was a generation of the self-made man who had gone through two wars – and maybe the war makes them tougher, so there are so many similarities.

The OdysseyThis is a new take on Cousteau, and we really do explore his flaws. It offers a different perspective of him.

Yeah, there are things that really belong to the family that shouldn’t even be discussed. After all, it is their private lives, and that’s the ambiguous line that cross as a filmmaker, to reveal things that at the end of the day do not belong to anyone but the people you’re talking about, it’s their lives. Who are we to judge his behaviour as far as his wife is concerned? Still you are telling the story of a man, painting a portrait, so that comes in to the colours of a man. In France Cousteau has a bad reputation because we love to destroy our statues, we love to behead our heroes, it’s really a great French tradition. I felt a little bit worried by the reaction of the family, basically because I feel that if you are portraying somebody famous, somebody who has existed, you have a moral responsibility towards, not only the audience, who have loved that person, but mostly towards the family, because they’re still around. You can’t do any old thing. I never tried to imitate him, but I wanted to give a sensation of him, and I still had to absorb his entire biography, many times, just to make sure we weren’t saying things that were wrong.

Through the act of portraying him, you’ve now got this affinity with the man, an intimate connection that will exist for the rest of your life. That must be a real perk to the job?

Yes it’s quite extraordinary. To the point where I would even, in certain scenes, ask him in a sort of bizarre magical way, how he would have reacted, to give me inspiration. But it all came from the notion that I had great respect for him, and maybe that came from the understanding of my father and the peace I had to make with my father after his death. The work that I had done in accepting the personality of my dad and his selfishness and his capacity for destruction, all that work made me receive the personality of Cousteau with a lot of peace and tranquility.

Are you quite a keen adventurer yourself? Do you like to travel the world, do you have that same sense of curiosity?

Yeah, it’s the only treasure that we keep with us. It’s why we’re on Earth, to enjoy what is there to be seen. I always have the impression that when I’m staying in my house I’m not discovering the world in the meantime. For us the reward as actors is that we do travel quite a lot, and we travel in a very interesting way, a very unconventional way. We’re not at all in the touristic system, we’re directly inside the lives of the inhabitants, it’s really interesting and we’re really spoilt in that way. So yes, absolutely. I love to travel to even really boring countries. I always say to myself, this is something else already. Belgium can be quite dull, but it’s not my everyday life, it’s already something else. So I find it exciting. Except Canada. I’m kidding. Well I say that, four months in Vancouver under the rain, it’s tough.

You mentioned earlier you were talking to Cousteau…

Yeah, that became a habit because a year and a half ago I did The King and I and I was talking to a Thai lady, and of course it’s based on a real king, and she said to me, ‘did you ask for his authorisation?’ but I thought, he’s dead, but she insisted I do a ceremony in which I ask for his authorisation. There were some Thai members in the company and so we did a ceremony, in which we greeted the dead king and asked for his authorisation to portray him. And I thought actually, that’s a lovely gesture. Why not? You are spreading information about a real man, so I’ve continued doing that.

What if they say no?

[Laughs]

So what character would you like to inhabit that you haven’t done yet?

I’d like to play a peasant. People always think I’m like a banker, a diplomat dressed in silk, but I have something in me that is more rustic than that, and people haven’t seen it, and it drives me nuts. What creates great performances and mostly in American actors, or English actors, is their capacity to be thrown in unexpected environments. God, the type-casting in this country is really bad. But if you’re French in America it’s like the worst nationality you can be. This is why I don’t live in the States. You can get away with it by being Scandinavian because it’s in Europe, but Americans don’t know where it is. Spanish because of the market, they need Hispanic actors. Italian you have to be really good looking to get away with. The Italians and the French are the ones they love to bash, but mostly the French. There is no future if you’re French in LA. Literally none. Even if you lose your accent they know you’re French, and that’s it. Anyway, I would also like to play Shakespearian king. Now is the time, since I’ve missed all the young leads in Shakespeare, I’d like to do the old guys now.

The Odyssey is released on August 18th. You can read our review of the film here.