L‘last time we met Matthias Schoenaerts had provided us with a key – it was 2018 and he had added another piece to the gallery of the damned, of the shadyborderline creatures that he persists in compiling: «I love people who fuck their lives». There are things that do not pass with time and the man who, when he interpreted A taste of rust and bonehe had the critic write Guardian that we were faced with “an impossible-to-love brute straight from casting heaven”does not like to be inconsistent.
With Djangothe TV series that Sky will air from 17 Februarydirection of the first four episodes by Francesca Comencini who is also the artistic director, takes care to deal directly with the myth, the pivotal character of spaghetti western culture created by Sergio Corbucci in 1966 and taken up in countless productions, up to celebrations, in the East, of Takashi Miike in 2007 and, in the West, by Quentin Tarantino in 2012. In the Django by Comencini, Schoenaerts is a gunslinger in Texas at the end of the 1800s, he doesn’t drag a coffin (others do, though) like Franco Nero, but with him shares a blood past. She drags her spurs in the sand until she arrives at New Babylon, a red-hot city where pity dwells not. But where his daughter lives, the only possibility of redemption.
Django, a man in search of the future
Django is a man looking for a second chance rather than revenge at this round.
A man’s intimate crisis is at the heart of an adventure. Django tries to move on after losing all the people he loved, he sees only one possibility in his future and looks desperately for it. Expressing the love he feels is then the only alternative for him to disappear from the face of the earth. All this in the western capsule. Very, very charming.
Matthias Schoenaerts is Django. The series will air on Sky Atlantic from 17 February.
Authorship is a novelty from the original. And his character is called Julien, after his father…
It’s a happy coincidence. And my sister, who unfortunately no longer exists, was called Sarah, like my daughter’s character in the series (played by Lisa Vicari, a German actress of Italian origin, ed). I read the script much more carefully when I realized this (the waitress arrives, we are at the Soho House in Rome, the two warmly embrace each other, exchanging compliments in Italian and English). I was here for four months during the shoot. I had become part of the furniture.
He seems to have been a good son, at ceremonies always accompanied by his mother who often came to the sets. While he didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his father, one of the most popular film and stage actors of post-war Belgium…
A lot of thoughts went through my head when I finally decided to do just what my father did. Those same thoughts recurred years later when I started working on this series. When I was a teenager I did things, a lot of things, I played music, I painted, but if there was one thing I didn’t want to do at all costs it was acting. I didn’t want to compare myself with the talent of the great Julien Schoenhaerts. Then when my father went into a coma, I decided to enroll at the Conservatory. Not to follow in his footsteps, but to try to figure out who he was. It was too late to ask him any questions now, and before that, when I could, he and I were apart. We have been for a long time. I think it can be said that I became an actor by accident.
Django is inspired by the 1966 western with Franco Nero.
Could he have done anything else? He is decidedly multitasking, he paints graffiti, as he did as a boy under the stage name Zenith, and has discovered a knack for photography.
All my life I have kept busy, I can’t sit still: I play four instruments, I paint and now I would like to combine something with photography, but I’m in no hurry. It takes an army to make a film, it’s like going to war. If I have to wait for ranks to form, I don’t want to sit idly by.
The Rebellion of the Western
Doesn’t he relax, meditate like everyone in Hollywood?
Twenty minutes is my maximum downtime. I will meditate when I am dead.
The spaghetti western, according to Francesca Comencini, conveys an idea of freedom, anarchy, rebellion. Is that the same for her?
The western is the genre in which the characters revolt against the law, against a tyrant, a family, against the Indians or against the settlers, it is a rebel genre. In the West there is always a revolution somewhere and there are always chains, real or invisible, to get rid of, there is class struggle and room for beatings. And then the western never dies. It is an archaic genre that can be interpreted with a modernist spirit every time, as we do in Django about masculinity and femininity.
Matthias Schoenaerts with Nicholas Pinnock in Django.
Indeed there are women who behave like men and seek revenge, like the terrible Noomi Rapace, evil and fundamentalist, and men like her with a feminine side who are not ashamed to show it.
And it’s by choice. It’s not just about reinventing the genre, but about telling the hearts of men and women in the world we find ourselves in today. No category is fixed forever, no concept is set in stone, good, bad, woman, man. It amazes me how often we find ourselves talking about these categories lately. Technologically we have gone so far, but we are real retards when it comes to addressing the fundamental philosophical questions of our time: we are slow, our thinking is rusty when it comes to accepting the new.
What is new today?
I would not say that sensitivity is a female prerogative. We are stuck in archetypes. When Marlon Brando cried on screen everyone freaked out and talked about a new form of masculinity. Men cry, he was the first to do it in the cinema and went against current thinking.
Brando’s tears
You are often compared to Brando for his physicality (“the Belgian Brando”, but also “the Flemish De Niro”)…
There are worse comparisons. And then, but can sensitivity be reduced to an external evidence such as tears? We add stereotypes to stereotypes.
It gives the impression of living in the present, wanting to be active, even politically. After turning Mustang (in which he was a convict in a rehabilitation program with wild horses), worked to improve prison conditions in Belgium.
Everything we do must also have a component for others. I painted a mural on the wall of the Antwerp prison which contains a poem by my father. At that moment I went back to when I was a boy and I was trying to figure out what was the right way to express myself. I was looking for it in books that reproduced paintings by Monet or Rubens, then I saw those colored things on the street walls and I started doing them too.
Matthias Schoenaerts and Maya Kelly in Django.
Is Antwerp always home?
Yes, but I’ve gotten used to going back and forth. Now I see it with different eyes, it has the quality of life of a village, as a child it seemed to me a metropolis.
And how does America see it?
It is a constantly changing, complicated place. But the whole world is complicated. We need an ethical revolution. There is wealth for all, food for all, water for all, what is missing is ethics. It is impossible that more and more individuals will not be able to pay their electricity bills. Anyone who tells us “There is no alternative” is certainly in bad faith.
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