Acting with an ex: for Juliette Binoche it was liberating.
In The Passion of Dodin Bouffant (France's official submission to the Oscars on March 10), the French actress 'duets' with Benoît Magimel, her ex-partner and the father of her 24-year-old daughter Hana.
"Everyone should do it", said the French icon star (in addition to the film in which food is the co-protagonist, the Oscar winner for The English Patient is currently playing the role of Coco Chanel in the Apple TV+ series The New Look on Christian Dior and the world of fashion) in an interview in the New York Times.
“For me it was liberating. Because there were no more blocks.
This allowed us to free expressiveness, words, feelings, being in each other's presence,” she said.
Juliette and Benoit didn't actually talk about that "beautiful" experience once the film set closed: "So I don't know what it was like for him."
But even for Magimel it shouldn't have been a dissimilar situation if what director Tran Anh Hung said is true that Magimel changed the words of the ending to add to his lines "...you are my wife" as well as "you are the my cook", then cut in the final version. "I got lost in her eyes", he would have said when Tran asked him why he had done it.
The chemistry between stars in love is famous among the 'special effects' they bring a successful film: see among the thousand cases, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton or, closer chronologically to us, Zendaya and Tom Holland (Spider man) or Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling (The Place Between the Pines). Rarer it is instead that, from a separation that is not necessarily amicable, positive sparks can emerge on the set. "It's like going back to school after the holiday", said Nicholas Hoult, less enthusiastic about Binoche, who had met Jennifer Lawrence on the set of -Men and had been with her a few years before the separation in 2014 and the new films in the franchise.
Jennifer Garner could now try, on track to shoot a film with Matt Damon directed by her ex-husband Ben Affleck.
The project, reported by the Hollywood Reporter, would be a thriller for Netflix entitled Animals.
Ben, married for two years to another ex, Jennifer Lopez, had met Garner on the set of Pearl Harbor in the late 1990s but the relationship didn't blossom until 2004 after they filmed Daredavil together.
They married in June 2005 and had three children together before their apparently amicable divorce in 2018.
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