After becoming one of France’s top actors thanks to movies like Brotherhood of the Wolf and Read My Lips, Vincent Cassel began to appear in more American films, one of the most respected ones being David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises with Viggo Mortensen, in which he played Kirill, the unstable son of a Russian mob boss who raped a 14-year-old girl who came to them for protection.
Later this month, Casell’s critically-acclaimed French gangster drama Mesrine will be released in the United States in two parts, and when ComingSoon.net sat down with him for an exclusive video interview last week, the actor told us that Kirill would indeed be back for the sequel, something he had discussed with Cronenberg while they were on the set of his current movie, A Dangerous Method.
“We talked very seriously about ‘Eastern Promises 2’ and it’s going to be shot in Russia with Viggo and myself,” he told us.
Cassel will also be reuniting soon with Christophe Gans, who directed Cassel in the period horror film Brotherhood of the Wolf, for an update on the classic French literary villain Fantômas, who appeared in dozens of novels and serialized silent movies in the early 20th Century before being resurrected in the ’60s with a trio of popular films by André Hunebelle starring Jean Marais.
“It’s going to be a huge action, supervillain movie, $70* million Euros, Jean Reno and myself, and it’s supervillains with high technology.” Like Mesrine, the title character is a master of disguise but not quite in the same way. “More in a techno way, I’d say.” (*At least we think Cassel said this, not $17 million, hard to tell.)
“I just finished another movie that might be really cool called ‘The Monk,'” he also told us. “It’s a gothic book from the 17th Century, and it’s about religion vs. life really, and I think it’s going to be pretty cool.”
In September, Cassel will be appearing in Darren Aronofsky’s thriller Black Swan, playing a character named “Korolyevna” that Cassel compares to George Balanchine, the founder of the New York City Ballet in that his character is “a control freak, a true artist using sexuality to direct his dancers.”
Look out for our full video interview with Vincent Cassel sometime in the next few weeks before Mesrine: Killer Instinct opens in New York and L.A. on August 27; the second part Public Enemy No. 1 opens on September 3.
