Camille Cottin knows her job is ridiculous. “It can be easily despised and mocked,” she admits of show business, before listing the reasons why: “Money. Superficiality. Frivolity. Narcissism. Egocentrism.”
That sums it up, but Cottin knows better than most why her industry matters. She is the star of Call My Agent!, the brains and sass behind the lead character Andréa in the French series about actors and their long-suffering lackeys. It appeared on Netflix at the precise time in the pandemic when everyone needed eccentric people to laugh at. And recently it returned, as a film, to cheer us up all over again.
We meet in – where else? – Paris for a coffee down a cobbled side street just by the Opera. The 47-year-old is bright-eyed, with a calm, collected presence and wearing a blue denim skirt and shirt.
Call My Agent! was watched by four million people an episode in France before it went to Netflix, racked up millions of streams and appeared in Top Tens all over the world. If Normal People provided the sex for those stuck at home during the pandemic, and I May Destroy You brought the grit, Call My Agent! was like tourism – giving us a chance to gawp at Paris without having to watch Emily in Paris.
Then, after four series of cameos from stars including Monica Bellucci (playing a version of herself who cannot find a boyfriend) and Isabelle Huppert as a stressed workaholic, Call My Agent! stopped.
Why was it a success? “It’s like a concert,” Cottin says. “You dream of backstage, and this gets to the private lives of actors. At first, French TV channels turned it down. They thought it would be niche. But I’ve been to Argentina, Greece, Brazil, England, India – everybody knows it.
“It laughs at the absurdness of actors, but loves them too. An agent never turns their phone off. If an actor calls at 3am, they have to answer. And it’s for nothing! Just for cinema! It’s not the White House. Or a hospital. You’re not saving lives, but nevertheless you live with the job with the same intensity, and there is something quite funny about that.”
It had become so popular that Sigourney Weaver asked to appear (and there was a less successful British spin-off that Cottin hasn’t seen), but it was time for a change. “You don’t want to disappoint people, and season four was fine, but everyone was disorientated, so we decided to stop,” Cottin says.
Did she think the show was over for good? “Yes and I wanted it to be done, too. I just wanted to do something else.”
Which Cottin did, going on to become a star worthy of cameos herself in the underrated kidnap drama Stillwater with Matt Damon (2021) and House of Gucci (2021), alongside Lady Gaga. She joins Marion Cotillard and Léa Seydoux as the most in-demand French stars in Hollywood.
Yet five years after calling it quits, she has returned as Andréa in the film. What changed? First, the original writer, Fanny Herrero, is back after missing out on series four. Second, Andréa is a director now, rather than an agent, which makes the role a new challenge.
Oh, and George Clooney is in it, which after Damon and Pitt means Cottin has completed the Ocean’s set. “I still need Julia Roberts,” she says, smiling. Clooney is in fine form – sending himself up to such an extent that he rips apart his own 2014 film The Monuments Men. He even sends up his father. “You know, he wrote that part,” Cottin says. Such is the power of Call My Agent!, a show that has made actors finally realise that honesty and humour are the path to respect.
Cottin was born to Gilles, an artist, and Edith, who wrote stories, in the suburbs of Paris in 1978, then moved to west London as a teenager because her stepfather had a job there in finance. What is the biggest difference between London and Paris? “It was 30 years ago. I don’t remember much.”
Her first job, back in France, was as an English teacher, but all she wanted was to act, taking jobs in fringe theatre and landing small roles in TV and film, always hoping for more.
Then, in 2013, came the TV show Connasse. What is its best translation? “It’s hard.” Is it rude? “Very rude.” Is there an English word that suits? “C---?” Right. Anyway, Connasse was a hit, which led to Call My Agent!
Cottin has risen in an entertainment industry that has changed. A couple of decades ago, most of the films about films, or TV, would focus on the glamour – some decadence, sure, but the lives would be aspirational. Now, though, self-referential TV shows tackle recent malaises that have tarnished showbiz, from overwrought diversity quotas to #MeToo scandals.
Call My Agent! faced the latter head-on. One TV episode had Juliette Binoche refusing to go on a yacht in Cannes with a powerful bad man, while in the film, when an actor drops out of her film, someone suggests to Andréa that she cast Gérard Depardieu who, last year, was convicted of sexual assault.
“We have our issues with Depardieu,” Cottin says, sighing. “Our president said that he was representing France, so we were all shocked.”
In 2023, after the accusations against Depardieu surfaced, President Macron said in an interview that the actor “makes France proud”, before slightly softening his stance.
There is a preconception abroad that the French can be blasé about #MeToo. Is that fair? “It’s very slow here,” Cottin says, nodding. She mentions the 54-year-old French actress Judith Godrèche, who has said that when she was 14 she began a relationship with the director Benoît Jacquot — who was 39. “How come everyone thought it was normal? Because it was cinema! Why did everyone find it glamorous? So, it is changing. But justice is very slow.”
We move to a lighter note — after all, Call My Agent! is a comedy and Cottin the breakout star of the show, effortlessly cool in her portrayal of an agent who loves her job a little too much. Its success is one reason the British version, Ten Percent in 2022, was a bomb – we had all spent a year watching the superior original.
Cottin, though, has also been part of a remake that did not last. In 2019, she took on the Phoebe Waller-Bridge role and turned Fleabag French. The show was called Mouche and, as with the remake of Call My Agent!, everyone had seen the original so it was cancelled.
“Our remake was basically the same,” Cottin says. “But, obviously, Phoebe had lived with that character and it was so personal that it was a bit crazy to try to do it again. But I met Phoebe, so I’m so happy.” No regrets, then? “No. You learn. It’s not the kind of accident that kills you.”
Another reason Cottin is back in Call My Agent! is that her husband said she should be at home more. She tells me this not with resentment, but with a sense of the practicality and juggling that people often forget celebrities have like the rest of us – and sounds like precisely the sort of insider plot that made Call My Agent! stand out.
Cottin is married to Benjamin, an architect, and has two children, Léon, 16, and Anna, 11. When Léon was born, she gave up her career in the theatre because otherwise Benjamin would be alone with the baby every night, and she struggled to make ends meet before Call My Agent!
“That changed my life,” she admits. “But, then, I started doing things abroad and my husband said, ‘You’re away too much, your family needs you.’ So now I’m trying to do stuff in Paris.” Stuff like Call My Agent!, a forthcoming film version of Les Misérables and this year’s breakout French comedy Just an Illusion.
“I just turned down a director I really like, but my daughter is starting a new school and I want to be there. He understood. He said, ‘The moment from when your children need you to the moment they don’t want you is so fast.’” She smiles. “But it’s hard because time goes by quickly and you’re scared, because it’s hard to do this job if you don’t do it 100 per cent.”
Call My Agent! The Movie is on Netflix now.
The Sunday Times Culture Magazine / News Licensing
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