Camille Cottin is teaching me to swear in French. I’d asked the 47-year-old about the comedy series that made her famous in her native country, the name of which I’m valiantly trying not to butcher. “Do you mean Connasse?” she offers, kindly. That’s the one! In it she cut her teeth playing Parisian meanies, which was perfect preparation for Andréa Martel, the swaggering and hilariously icy celebrity wrangler in Call My Agent!, who made her globally famous. Connasse, she says, typically gave her fellow Frenchies a particular idea of her.
“We don’t have a proper translation for that word,” she explains. “It means to be a bit rogue, I suppose. But you have ‘con’ and you have ‘connasse’, and ‘con’ literally means ‘c***’.”
I practically spit out my drink. “Connasse”, she adds, puts a little twist on the word.
“It has something a bit mean about it,” she continues. “Arrogant. Despising. Pretentious. Someone with no consideration for others.”
It was a hidden camera show, which saw Cottin behaving obnoxiously towards unsuspecting members of the public. She notoriously attempted to climb the gates of Kensington Palace to woo Prince Harry for the film version of the show – though, contrary to popular belief, she didn’t actually spend two nights in a London jail as punishment. An arrest and a firm talking to, though? That was accurate. Anyway, the show’s backers knew Connasse would create waves early into its development, and asked Cottin if she’d prefer them to change the title. “They were like, ‘Are you sure? Because people will call you ‘connasse’. But I didn’t think anyone would really watch it.” Cut to its release, and Connasse’s backers were proven correct.
“For years I would be in the supermarket and people would scream ‘hey c***!’ at me.” She hoots with husky laughter. “But it’s fine. People still watch it here in France, so I’ll always hear a little ‘c***’ from time to time.”
I genuinely thought I would never work again. But then Call My Agent! started being binged, and that encouraged the producers to think, OK – why did we end this?
Cottin is great fun, like a glamorous socialite with a mouth like a sailor. She’s at home in Paris, her hair shampoo-ad glossy and her schedule all over the shop. She’s been juggling promotion for three separate projects at once: a film adaptation of Les Misérables, a film version of Call My Agent! on Netflix, and a brilliant coming-of-age comedy called Just an Illusion that this week arrives in UK and Irish cinemas. Life is nicely chaotic, as proven when her 11-year-old daughter wanders into Cottin’s room to try to borrow the iPad she’s speaking to me on. (Funnily enough, a similar thing happened the last time Cottin was in the pages of The Independent, which might suggest her daughter just really, really dislikes us.)
Just an Illusion finds Cottin in mum mode on-screen, playing the restless mother to Vincent, an 11-year-old boy growing up in the suburbs of Paris in the late Eighties. Vincent, as played by the bright newcomer Simon Boublil, pines for a classmate, hilariously discovers blue movies with his friends, and starts asking all of the big questions in life. But it’s a journey of self-actualisation that is mirrored in his parents, too. Cottin’s Sandrine longs for a life outside of domesticity, and Louis Garrel’s Yves struggles through prolonged unemployment.
“It was this moment in time where it suddenly became possible for women to try to access more from life,” Cottin says. “I think the worst thing is not being able to evolve and to have projects and to imagine something else for your existence. And I liked the fact that Sandrine rebels, but in a quiet way. It’s a quiet rebellion.”
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She saw her own mother’s struggles in Sandrine’s, and the battles her generation waged that allowed Cottin’s generation to be free. “Adventure, travelling and existing outside the norm,” she says. “They’re all things I’ve been attracted to.” She sighs. “It’s complicated, though, being a mother and still wanting those things. It sometimes doesn’t convene so easily.” She has an older son, aged 16, too. She says acting is the closest she can get to adventure and travelling now. “It gives you the possibility to live multiple lives at once. It’s a beautiful gift.”
Just an Illusion felt real to her, she adds – up to a point, anyway. “Well, Vincent manages to seduce the girl of his dreams in the end,” she laughs. “When I was that age, all the boys I was in love with were absolutely never in love with me.”
And, I add, it takes forever to get over them, doesn’t it?
“Exactly,” she says. “And he’s always the popular guy who’s an asshole to you and bullies you, but you love him anyway. But then years later you see him in the supermarket and he’s lost all of his charisma and he’s not cool anymore, and [you realise] how much I’d prefer to be me than be with him.” It’s a tangent that suddenly becomes incredibly profound. It’s very, very French.
open image in galleryI tell her that Just an Illusion is being released in the UK during the same week as Netflix unveils the film version of Call My Agent!. It seems to be news to her. “Oh god, that’s so much of me!” The original show transformed her from a local success story – she was a jobbing actor bouncing between theatre and television beforehand – into an international one. Roles in the likes of House of Gucci and the Matt Damon drama Stillwater followed.
She says she’s always had a funny relationship with the show, which ended just as it took off worldwide. “This seems completely megalomaniacal to say, but it’s been seen in quite a lot of countries,” she laughs. “It was really Covid, I think, because it all takes place in the office and people were missing the office at that point.”
Covid was rough for her, personally speaking. “I genuinely thought I would never work again, and that Covid was the end of everything. But then Call My Agent! started being binged, and that encouraged the producers to think, OK – why did we end this?”
In the new film, Cottin’s Andréa has departed the agent life to direct her own movie, even at one point wooing a cameo-ing George Clooney to star in it. If the series felt as if it ended a bit abruptly, with Andréa’s agency collapsing and all the characters going their separate ways, Call My Agent! The Movie is more of a love letter – to cinema, to work, to friendship. Fanny Herrero, who wrote the show’s first three seasons but not its fourth, has also returned, and Cottin says her presence was felt.
“Season four ended up quite sad – the agency had closed, Andréa’s relationships had been torn apart, everybody went on their way alone. It was not a happy end, so it was great to have everyone back together.”
open image in galleryEven if Call My Agent! had finished as a series, though, it was tricky to escape overall. The premise has been remade a staggering 11 times so far – in countries as far and wide as Turkey and Indonesia – with more on the horizon. But the not-very-good British version of the show, titled Ten Percent, was swiftly cancelled in 2022 after a single series. Cottin won’t be broached on her thoughts on it, but she says that remaking a hit is an inherently risky proposition. She would know, after all – in 2019 she chose to star in a French adaptation of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. She admits it didn’t work.
“We decided to do it at a time when nobody in France had seen it,” she says. “But by the time we’d done it, the original had exploded. That’s the thing with remakes: you don’t control the timeline. And it was exactly the same show only without Phoebe, who’s like the beating heart of it. And it all came from her mind. It was, you know, maybe a mistake.”
“I think remakes are great when you want to remake something that hasn’t been widely shared already,” she continues. “You have to be precious with them. Everything is global now, everyone watches in lots of different languages. So remaking a film, or a TV show – it’s dangerous.”
Coming from a woman who risked arrest by the Met all for the sake of a comedy skit, we should probably take her word for it.
‘Just an Illusion’ is in cinemas, and ‘Call My Agent! The Movie’ is streaming on Netflix