Despite actor Vincent Perez's sober and brooding
celluloid image, he's warm, vivacious and funny.
In the new French epic Indochine, Vincent Perez portrays
Jean-Baptiste Le Guen, a naval lieutenant in the turbulent Southeast Asia of 1930 who
becomes involved with a French woman (Catherine Deneuve) and her adopted Indochinese
daughter. The three-hour romantic melodrama took nearly six months to complete and was
filmed almost entirely in Vietnam and Malaysia.
"I fell in love with Vietnam," remarks Perez, who was born in
Switzerland to German and Spanish parents. "It was like being a different
world."
Perez is known for serious, sober performances (he played the romantically
impaired Christian in Cyrano de Bergerac), so his humor comes as a surprise. When
asked about Deneuve, he jokes, "Who? That blond girl?"
Soon Perez will appear in his first English-speaking role as the
near-mythic Spanish bullfighter Manolete. "I have to lose my French to work in a
neutral accent," he says with a laugh. "Don't fall out of your chair,
please."
[Written by Henry Cabot Beck]
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