Adèle Exarchopoulos on new film The Anarchist:' I always need a kind of complexity in my character'

Adèle Exarchopoulos exploded onto the scene in ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’. Now she’s raising hell playing an anarchist

Adèle Exarchopoulos in The Anarchists (Rex Features)

Adèle Exarchopoulos in The Anarchists became one of the most sought-after actresses in the world when she played the object of Léa Seydoux’s desire in the Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Colour. It was a performance of such voracity that the jury, headed by Jane Campion, took the unique step of giving the top prize at Cannes to the two female leads alongside director Abdellatif Kechiche.

Then came the fall. Julie Maroh, the author of the graphic novel upon which the story was based, slammed the sex scenes as being “ridiculous” and bordering on porn. Seydoux – now a Bond girl –accused the director of pushing his cast too far. It all rather took the shine off the triumph of the film. Exarchopoulos, 21, lets out a noisy sigh.

“Oh, that’s in the past,” she says. She was a bystander in the arguments and she doesn’t want to fuel the fire. “You’re the only one still focusing on that story,” she tells me. “It’s a long time ago. We felt like we didn’t have anything to prove at the time. But that’s how you learn. You don’t know yet what it’s like to do promotion for a film. You learn not to give too much importance to what people think of you.”

Adèle Exarchopoulos in the film The Anarchist (BBC)

There is a big difference between the Exarchopoulos I first met in the aftermath of her Cannes debut when she was just 18, and the more reserved woman in front of me today. Two years ago, she was running around joking and shooting comments from the cuff, but now everything seems a bit more polished: the clothes she wears, the relaxed attitude. There has been a professional makeover.

In the afterglow of the reception to Blue... she got a call to meet with Sean Penn. “He met me in Los Angeles and he spoke to me about La Vie d’Adele [as the film was known in France]. He said that it had moved him and he told me about this script, it was incredible.”

That script is The Last Face, in which Charlize Theron, once romantically linked to Penn, plays the director of an international aid organisation in Liberia, who falls in love with a relief doctor played by Javier Bardem. Exarchopoulos plays a journalist. It’s her first role in English.

“It’s hard to act in English because I think you need time to work on the language and really enjoy it,” she says.

Today she flits between French and English. “I have the feeling that I don’t have the same personality and to start with it was really frustrating.”

Her next new film is The Anarchists, about police infiltrating a group of 19th-century French radicals. After the success of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, she was inundated with offers for roles. That she picked two with such overtly political subject matter says a lot about her sensibilities. “I don’t know if it’s conscious or not, but I always need a kind of complexity in my character,” she says. “I don’t want to play something smooth. I can wait to make a comedy or a something absurd.”

Yet she doesn’t want to become outspoken or take up campaigns as Penn has done. “I’m too young to know if I want to be as active as Sean Penn,” she protests. “It’s a question of age. There are people who are active at a young age, yet it’s not something that I necessarily want to do. I don’t have the same idea. Right now I’m only 21 years old and have lived only in cinema.”

Ask about that life in cinema and she sighs, saying it’s “a little annoying”. Her father was a guitarist and her mother a nurse. They brought her up in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. Her Greek surname comes from her grandfather.

“I made some theatre for friends when I was eight. My family are not in the profession,” she rattles off. “One day a casting agent asked me to do a professional casting, when I was 12. I didn’t get the part. Then another agent told me there was a short being shot in Brittany and I won the role. The actor in the film spoke about me to his agent and the agent asked if I wanted to be in cinema. I was a little bit lost and for fun, I say yes, and I began winning roles in movies. And with the experience I gained I had a desire to make acting my life.”

By the time she was 19, she had 10 films under her belt. Not that she likes to look back: “I don’t really deal with nostalgia. If something has no consequence for today, then I move on.”

She is far more animated talking about The Anarchists in which she plays Judith, a young anarchist who equates freedom and liberty with sex. It is set in 1899 just after the Third Republic has introduced the lois scélérates legislation to clamp down on anarchist groups. “I really didn’t know anything about the period. But then I started reading up on it, and putting on the super-tight corsets as well as listening to director Elie Wajeman really helped me travel back to the period. At the same time we wanted to keep an eye on ensuring that the film has a contemporary resonance and is not just too theatrical.”

Her research veered between reading the text of Les Justes, a play by Albert Camus about a group of Russian socialist revolutionaries who assassinated the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in front of the Kremlin in 1905, and watching Johnny Depp and Al Pacino in Donnie Brasco –the 1997 film about an FBI agent who infiltrated a New York crime family.

The Anarchists looks at the grey area where one man’s terrorist shades into another man’s freedom fighter. As for her own leanings, she says: “I can’t call myself an anarchist even if, when I dived into reading about the philosophy and ideology, there were a lot of things that I agreed with: the desire to be free at any price, the fear of living in a society that I don’t agree with and the battle against inequality and injustice.”

It helped that her co-star was Tahar Rahim, who also became an overnight star due to the success that A Prophet had at Cannes, “We spoke about it a lot, the similarity between both our stories is quite funny,” she says. “When you arrive with a film and you’re so young and exposed and everyone looks at you, everything is a surprise.”

The Anarchist plays in London (12 November), Glasgow (14 November) and Edinburgh (7 December) as part of the French Film Festival (www.frenchfilmfestival.org.uk) to 13 December