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Matthias Schoenaerts: how the Belgium Brando made it in Hollywood
Actor Matthias Schoenaerts has just dropped his bottle of Evian on the all-white shag rug under his feet. “It’s only water,” I shrug, blithely. “Actually I mixed it with a bit of vodka,” jokes Schoenaerts in a pronounced American accent, sticking his tongue out of the side of his mouth and throwing his pupils in opposite directions. “Then it becomes more fun,” he spits, enunciating the last word like Jack Nicholson chopping down a bathroom door.
The Belgian is currently onto his last day of promoting new movie Red Sparrow at Claridge’s in London. As any actor will tell you, the tedious repetition of these promotional activities can catch up on you. But Schoenaerts is dealing with it in good humour. “It freezes your brain, but I don’t want to moan.” Anyway, the contracted engagements are nearing an end – he is set to leave London straight after our meeting and journey 50 minutes by plane to his home in Antwerp.
In Red Sparrow, Schoenaerts plays Ivan Dimitrevich Egorov, the bureaucratic uncle of Jennifer Lawrence’s lead, who notices her ‘powers of seduction’ and thusly coerces her into joining him in the Russian secret service. It’s a proper spy blockbuster, i.e. the Americans are good and the Russians, for the most part and especially in Schoenaerts’ case, are bad. Red Sparrow has lashings of gore, gratuitous nudity and Bourne-esque grit.
It’s not the sort of film that Western audiences might associate with Schoenaerts. The 40-year-old first attracted attention outside of his homeland at the turn of the decade in the films Bullhead and Rust and Bone, opposite Marion Cotillard. He was dubbed the Belgian Marlon Brando for his hulking frame and evocative portrayals of manly men.
Hollywood came beckoning and he undertook a run of period dramas, from World War II romantic drama Suite Francaise to the Oscar baiting The Danish Girl.
Despite the increasing profile of his film projects, he has chosen to stay in the city of his birth. Antwerp is in the northern, Flemish part of Belgium where Dutch, Schoenaerts’ first language, is predominantly spoken. He also speaks fluent French (most Belgians are taught both at school), English (“from watching American movies growing up”) and Italian. Where did the Italian come from?
“After a car accident, I had a coma, woke up and spoke fluent Italian.”
My mouth gawps in disbelief. We’re only six minutes in to our conversation. Have I already got my headline – ‘Hollywood star crashes car, wakes up Italian.’
“No I’m kidding,” he chuckles, ever the joker. I curse my luck. “Some members of my step-family are Italian. But that type of stuff can happen. Apparently somewhere in your genetic history there may have been an ancestor of a different origin and it stays in your DNA. Then when you’ve had the accident it shakes things all about and suddenly it pops up and you’re speaking fluent Chinese.”
Schoenaerts credits his multilingualism with helping him break out of the Belgian acting scene and onto the international stage. “It gives me a lot of freedom of movement. That was my biggest ambition in life, to not be confined by a country or a language, or a continent. To keep on discovering and moving around. Language is a key to that.
“Belgium is so small and I was just looping around like a little goldfish in a bowl. It brought in a lot of oxygen. All of a sudden [he exhales sharply] there’s an enormous amount of new people that you can meet and work with.”
The path to acting greatness hasn’t always been a straight one for Schoenaerts. Aged 16 he came close to becoming a professional football player instead with local team Beerschot A.C. “People started trying to tell me what to do and all of a sudden I felt cornered and the playfulness disappeared.
His father Julien is regarded as one of the finest actors in the Dutch language and while he acted in a play with his father aged 8, and again at 13 in the 1992 film Daens, he quickly disregards these parts as walk-on roles. It wasn’t until he went to The Academy of Dramatic Arts in Antwerp aged 21 where his passion for acting began to develop.
As he speaks, Schoenaerts’ eyes dart between the corners of the ceiling. He makes eye contact for a flicker before a new thought trails him off in another direction. It’s not shyness – he seems like a man consummately at ease within himself. It’s more likely an excess of energy and a desire to be completely in the moment. He also swears like a sailor.
Speaking animatedly (and with foul mouth) about wanting to keep his career choices fluid, to choose scripts and parts depending on whether they inspire an emotional reaction in him, you get the feeling that Schoenaerts is in no mood to start playing the Hollywood game.
“I feel like people are very meticulous about image and about projects and they sit down with their managers and have five hour meetings. If that works for you then that’s what you got to do. But it’d drive me nuts. Everything becomes anticipation so where’s the freedom in that?
"It’s all vanity because you’re trying to create that perfect thing in order to create whatever perception, and then what? You’re just putting a corset around yourself and trying to do everything that answers that perception you want to create. It’s a horrible life. I don’t want to be like that. That’s why you see so many sad actors. I want to be free.”
This laissez faire attitude appears to be paying dividends for Schoenaerts. He is to star as another Russian opposite Colin Firth in Kursk, set for release later this year. The film focuses on the events of 2000’s Kursk submarine disaster, where 118 Russian sailors died, with Schoenaerts in the lead role as Russian Navy captain-lieutenant Mikhail Kalekov.
But talk of sailors must wait until next time, for now it’s back to Antwerp. He leaps to pick up the Evian bottle on the floor, swings his hefty shoulders around to face me and with a bone crunching handshake that would put Putin to shame, apologises for his repeated cursing. He can’t resist one last muse however: “People look at the world and they see themselves as the centre point. Just let that go. Be more fluid. Be more flexible. And then everything becomes a lot easier.”