Ironically for someone called on by Hollywood to embody Gallic savoir-faire, Reno isn’t even really French. I understand – they do not have time for sentiment.” “If you don’t follow the road they prepare for you, they change and take someone else. But he is relaxed about the reductive Hollywood thinking that often winds up slotting European heavyweights like him into such pantomime. It’s another notch for him in a run of Eurovillains that includes Rollerball, Alex Cross and, last year, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. He has a Yan Pei-Ming and a Pierre Soulages, but his fee for The Doorman didn’t stretch far enough for him to achieve “the dream” – a Magritte. “I like art, but only if I can look at it every day – that’s very important,” he says. He is an art-lover in real life, but is not, like his character, quite ready to kill for it. “Ruby! I liked her.” Reno commends her kick-ass capabilities, but barely lifts a finger himself, marshalling a band of mercenaries as they try to recover a cache of old masters. “Ruby,” I say, referring to his co-star Ruby Rose. “I liked the story, and then to do the villain again – why not? And the girl, what’s her name? I’m very bad with names. It’s serviceable fun, no more, and Reno doesn’t pretend otherwise. He fills the bad guy slot on The Doorman, a new Die Hard-cribbing martial arts film that sets an art heist within the confines of a New York hotel. Photograph: David Lee/NetflixĮven at this stage in his career, his name has enough currency to get him through Hollywood’s door. Reno, centre, in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. “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.” “With the virus, everybody is making introspection,” he says, with philosophical Francophone syntax. But it hasn’t stopped the melancholia closing in. He has been busy during the pandemic, on a six-month filming stint in Vigo, Galicia on a Spanish-language detective series for Amazon. Yet here he is, caught at an extreme Dutch angle on my laptop screen, fuller-faced than back then, but otherwise hale. 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. He already seemed timeless, providing grizzled, existentially marinated cool-for-hire in numerous Hollywood blockbusters. M aybe 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.
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