Lea Seydoux on Blue is the Warmest Color, Love Scenes, and Marlon Brando | Screen Tests | W magazine

In this Screen Tests interview, French actress Lea Seydoux talks about learning English at summer camp, her upcoming film Blue Is The Warmest Color, the challenge of love scenes, how sex is the universal language, and her crush on Marlon Brando in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' but NOT 'Last Tango in Paris'. At the Cannes Film Festival, Steven Spielberg, the head of the jury, phoned Léa Seydoux, one of the stars of Blue Is the Warmest Color, and told her to attend the awards ceremony. At 28, Seydoux is one of the most versatile young actresses in her native France. She has played a loyal courtier to Marie Antoinette in last year’s Farewell, My Queen, a reckless young mother in Sister, and the object of desire in the upcoming Beauty and the Beast, opposite Vincent Cassel. Spielberg did not tell the actress what category she had won, but Seydoux assumed that she and her co-star Adèle Exarchopoulos would receive the best actress prize. “Instead, we won the Palme d’Or!” Seydoux told me in June. Blue Is the Warmest Color had ignited her career in America. The film, based on a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, tells the story of a young girl (Exarchopoulos) who falls in love with a punky blue-haired artist, played by Seydoux, has been divisive in more ways than one. The onscreen sexual encounters are very long, intense, and more in keeping with a male heterosexual perspective than a homosexual point of view. Maroh, who is openly gay, has decried them as “uninformed, unconvin