He made his name as a hitman in Leon. Now he’s back in a kung fu heist caper set in New York. The art-loving, olive oil-making French actor explains why he loves playing ‘le baddie’
Maybe because he is fixed in our minds at the time he became world-famous in his mid-40s as a gauche hitman in Léon: The Professional, it is strange thinking of Jean Reno as the age he now is: 72. He already seemed timeless, providing grizzled, existentially marinated cool-for-hire in numerous Hollywood blockbusters. If you’re French, then he’s doubly part of the woodwork: in 1993, he played time-travelling knight Godefroy Amaury de Malfête in Les Visiteurs, a film that is a national institution.
Yet here he is, caught at an extreme Dutch angle on my laptop screen, fuller-faced than back then, but otherwise hale. He has been busy during the pandemic, on a six-month filming stint in Vigo, Galicia on a Spanish-language detective series for Amazon. But it hasn’t stopped the melancholia closing in. “With the virus, everybody is making introspection,” he says, with philosophical Francophone syntax. “Thinking about the past and ageing: What am I going to do? I’m old, I don’t have much time, and if the virus catches me, I’m dead.”
