It can be both a head start and a burden to bear the name of an illustrious predecessor – but what if you look like him, too? Victor Belmondo’s pillowy lips purse in amusement when the inevitable question comes up. “It’s not annoying. I get it,” he says. Although a touch less pugnacious-looking, he is unmistakably of the same lineage as his grandfather, Jean-Paul. “I know the name I have and who my grandfather was. From the moment I do the same job, it’s normal people have questions. As long as we talk about my films as well, it’s OK.”
So we park the trifling matter of Jean-Paul, who died two years ago, to chat about other things. Belmondo, 29, has been quietly firing up his own acting career, this month with a meaty supporting role in Lie With Me (Arrête avec tes Mensonges), a faintly Almodóvarian homecoming drama directed by Olivier Peyon. He plays Lucas, who works for a distillery in the town of Cognac that is welcoming back – 35 years after he left – a bestselling novelist, Stéphane, to act as its brand ambassador. But both men are forced to grapple with the past: Stéphane’s unrequited first love was Lucas’s late father.
However, Lucas has an agenda. It was the story’s secretive aspect that hooked Belmondo. “He’s a character who first appears quite light and then falls into something deeper and darker,” he says over a video call. “That’s what touched me – the degree to which this darkness that he has inside shows itself bit by bit.” Belmondo is good in the role, delivering a distinctive flippant impatience that would have made his grandfather proud.
Lie With Me and Belmondo’s one lead role to date in 2021’s Envole-Moi – a springy comedy about a feckless party animal press-ganged by his doctor father into looking after a disabled boy – both feature characters pressed beneath the weight of past generations’ decisions. There’s one line in Envole-Moi – when someone comments that there are now two doctors in the family – that feels very on the nose regarding his decision to take up acting. Belmondo swears it was a coincidence: “It was only later, watching the film, that I said to myself: ‘It’s funny, you’d almost say it was done on purpose.’ It was probably unconscious.”
Belmondo stepped into the family business the same way. “When I said to myself: ‘I want to be an actor,’ I never said: ‘Yes, but that’s what Papi does too.’ It never came into my head,” he says. In his case, acting was an outlet for excessive energy. “I didn’t necessarily express that in the right way – like in the classroom or back home.” What kind of thing? “Stupid stuff, my whole childhood and adolescence.”
He is the son of Jean-Paul’s third child, Paul, who became a racing driver, and Luana Tenca, an Italian chef and television presenter. Belmondo says that Jean-Paul was a loving grandparent, though not the type to offer career advice. “He was a very modest person, and not the type to theorise about the job. For him, being an actor was a big game.” All the same, Belmondo thinks, it was important to him that someone was keeping the family shop open.
One of Belmondo’s first encounters with his grandfather on screen was in the 1980 spy thriller The Professional; unable to distinguish fiction from reality, he started crying when someone machine-gunned his Papi. He is particularly fond of the sozzled 1962 comedy-drama A Monkey in Winter, a kind of bistro Billy Liar, directed by Henri Verneuil. And how could any impressionable young kid fail to be impressed by the older Belmondo’s Tom Cruise-avant-l’heure penchant for doing insane stunts, such as the demented quarry fall in Verneuil’s Le Casse in 1971, or surfing the Paris metro in 1975’s Peur Sur la Ville? “He loved doing them, even in real life,” says Belmondo. “I don’t think a day went by without him pulling some stunt or other. I quite like performing stunts, but I don’t have the same appetite.”
That freedom and fluidity was the lifeblood of the nouvelle vague, which his grandfather inaugurated with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in 1960. And the movement’s reminder that cinema should remain in touch with life remains a challenge to actors to find moments of truth. He is more comfortable doing that under the rubric of serious drama, but admires those such as the classic 60s comedian Louis de Funès who can style it out. “He played it up enormously, but was always true in whatever he did. I don’t know if I’m capable of doing that.”
After Jean-Paul’s death in September 2021, Belmondo gave a eulogy in front of his grandfather’s tricolore-draped coffin at a national homage at les Invalides, Paris; as close to a state funeral as a civilian is going to get. Gripping the podium, he described Jean-Paul as an “eternal sun”. “I was so emotional on that day,” he says. “But the important thing wasn’t the television or anything else. It was just saying a few words for my grandfather.”
With Godard also recently departed, the nouvelle vague generation is flickering out. In a canny bit of lateral casting, Belmondo recently starred in a TV biopic of Brigitte Bardot, playing Roger Vadim, the director of And God Created Women and Bardot’s first husband. Vadim was, says Belmondo, “the epicurean par excellence. I believe he’d decided at some point in his life to be happy whatever happened – and nothing would take that away.” That spirit was a marker of the times: “It was an insouciant era. My grandfather was insouciant, Vadim was insouciant, Bardot was insouciant.” So it must have been nice to film in Saint-Tropez and bathe in bronzed nostalgia? “It does you good to be a bit insouciant.”
Does he think it’s possible for a star to emerge now and sweep the zeitgeist off its feet in the same way as his grandfather’s generation did? “Anything’s possible,” he says. “But the industry is no longer the same. In France, there’s less of a star system than before. We’ve got lots of great actors, but that means that there aren’t one or two who necessarily stand out like Bardot or Catherine Deneuve. Maybe there is just too much talent today.”
Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, of course, and the new model Belmondo will have to find his own path. But acting’s essential aims remain the same; the dance of art and life that put his grandfather centre-stage as an actor and celebrity. From promising first signs, it looks as if it is an active gene in him, too. “In life, he was someone who only lived in the present, who didn’t have a thought about the past or the future and enjoyed every moment without fretting about anything. The spontaneity he had in the films was the same as he had in life.”
Lie With Me is in cinemas and available on digital platforms on 18 August.
