Juliette Binoche is chilly. It is a sunny day in central London, but she has bundled herself up in a sturdy leather jacket and ordered a hot chocolate. “Thin or thick?” our waiter asks. Binoche seems thrown by the question. Thick, she says, ambivalently. The waiter’s eyes light up: “Ah, the French way!” Binoche shrugs. As if anyone needed a reminder. Binoche is to France what Matthew McConaughey is to Texas, or Sean Connery was to Scotland – that brilliant face of hers, round and lovely, may as well be printed on the national flag by this point. Binoche has spent more than four decades as one of the world’s most adventurous movie stars; putty in the hands of auteurs such as Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Godard, Olivier Assayas and Michael Haneke. The confectionery romp Chocolat and the grand love story of The English Patient – for which she won an Oscar in 1997 – may have leant into her gamine luminosity, and are likely her most well-known films, but they’re mere snapshots of a more colourful, mercurial career. Her ashen grief in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue avoids histrionics – there is a slight quiver here, a flush of devastation there. There is potency, too, to her reckless, sophisticated sexuality in Denis’s Let the Sunshine In, and her carnally minded scientist in the filmmaker’s sci-fi oddity High Life. Haneke seems to bring out the icy prickliness in her, in movies like Code Unknown and the frightening Caché. When she is on film, you never know which Binoche you’re going to get. Likewise, in person. The 61-year-old is fiercely intense, slamming her hands down on the table between us at one point. Soon after, she is giggly and upbeat. The mere act of her sitting down feels grand and theatrical, as if it’s been scripted by a dramatist. She pulls off her jacket (too hot), then slips it over her back (too cold). She takes an almighty gulp from her hot chocolate as soon as it arrives, and burns her mouth. Interviewers have found Binoche incredibly open, spilling out facts about her love affairs (among her notable former partners are the filmmaker Leos Carax and, reportedly, Daniel Day-Lewis, while she has two children, one with the scuba diver André Halle and the other with the actor Benoît Magimel). Others have remarked on her reticence. Whichever Binoche you get, she’ll certainly keep you on your toes. We are here to talk about The Return, a subversive spin on Homer’s Odyssey that marks her third film with the actor Ralph Fiennes. They first appeared together as Cathy and Heathcliff in a maligned adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in 1992, then played a traumatised nurse and disfigured convalescent, respectively, in The English Patient. Much of the power in The Return, which casts the pair as lovers separated for decades by war, stems from their shared history as actors: we’ve watched them fall in love once before, share a kind of love story elsewhere; now they reunite in a world of loincloths and savagery. “We’ve remained friends over the years,” Binoche says. “So we came to this story with luggage.” She laughs. “I moved myself, honestly. Because we were playing these archetypes but also playing human beings, and it was the two of us bringing that humanity to them. We were Odysseus and Penelope, yes, but we were also Ralph and Juliette.” I ask how they’ve evolved in the years since they first met. “I see evolution more with Ralph than I see with myself,” she thinks. “I know him better now. He’s let me in closer to him. I know his desires, I know his dark sides and his beauty.” She won’t be broached on the specifics, but says she adores him. “He knows his limits, and he’s not afraid to talk about them with me. It feels like we are from the same family in a way.” Fiennes has spoken about being more guarded and grumpy when he was a young actor, particularly on sets, while Binoche would seek rapport and agency. Many early interviews described her as lightly challenging for her directors – Claude Berri once dropped her from a film mid-production for taking issue with choices made by her character. Today, though, Binoche disputes that she was like that early on, and that it actually took time for her to gain such confidence. For The Return, she asked director Uberto Pasolini to allow her total free rein for three takes of each one of her scenes, in exchange for his having control over her performance from take four onwards. He could then pick and choose which Binoche he wanted in the editing room. “I would never have dared ask that as a younger actress,” she says. “But it is essential to me. When a director has strict ideas about how they want a character to be, I struggle. As an actor, it is dangerous to be a prisoner of someone else’s thoughts. Acting needs to be unpredictable. It needs to be about discovery in the moment. It is almost a call of the spirit. Or a prayer.” She feels everything, she says. When I ask if she and Fiennes have ever, on some level, fallen for one another while playing out love stories over the last 30 years, I am surprised by her sudden candour. “Of course we fell in love,” she says, firmly. “Your body, your eyes, your skin, your being – it has to believe it, and you have to make the audience believe it.” Her hands become animated as she explains further. “In the realm of acting, you do believe what you’re feeling, every single step. But it doesn’t mean that you are lovers outside of it.” She senses my disappointment – that I briefly thought I’d got a scoop. “I understand it from your perspective, though,” she says. “I remember asking Meryl Streep, ‘Did you fall in love with Robert De Niro [on the set of The Deer Hunter]? How could you resist him?’ She said, ‘I love him, I’m really deeply in love with him, but when it comes down to life, it’s another story.’” Binoche smiles. “That’s acting.” The young Binoche, who was packed off to boarding school at the age of four after her parents divorced, saw the world of acting as a space of stability. She talks lovingly of sets, and the importance of experts in different mediums (actors, costume designers, lighting technicians) all coming together for the sake of a common goal; she repeatedly refers to Fiennes as “a brother”. Stardom happened quickly: minor parts in films and on stage led to André Téchiné’s Rendez-Vous in 1985, in which her character – a young actor – flitted between toxic men. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where she played Day-Lewis’s tormented lover, thrust her onto the world stage in 1988. For all her international success, though, she has never been drawn to American cinema for long periods of time. This has partly been a positive – little feels quite so jarring as witnessing the elegant Binoche die of radiation poisoning in Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla reboot, or romance Steve Carell in the forgotten comedy Dan In Real Life. But there was always a sense that the rhythms of American celebrity were slightly alien to her sensibility. Just look at her Oscars speech, which clocks in at around 25 seconds (“It must be the shortest ever!”) and feels incredibly, unusually guileless. She is surely one of the few winners to explicitly state mid-speech that she expected the award to go to a different person in her category. Lauren Bacall, whom she mentioned by name, was indeed the favourite to win that year for Barbra Streisand’s quirky romantic drama The Mirror Has Two Faces. She speaks of that period as if it were a strange dream. “I definitely enjoyed the attention [The English Patient] was getting, and myself as well,” she says. “And I felt like I needed to give something back to Anthony [Minghella].” The filmmaker was known to bond strikingly with his actors. (He directed Binoche once more, in 2006’s urban drama Breaking and Entering, and died in 2008 at the age of 54.) She says that at first she had a difficult time on the set of The English Patient. “I was trembling all the time. I was so insecure. I was aware of the chance I’d received by getting to play that part, and I would find myself just crumbling. But he helped me become more comfortable, more creative. He took such care of me, so when the Oscars happened, I played the game for him.” In conversation, Binoche is loose with her words but quickly dismisses attempts to probe deeper than the surface. Pick up on particular phrases she uses (the “game” of Hollywood, or her “crumbling” on sets) and a barrier appears. Ask about the phone call she received from Quentin Tarantino in which he confessed that he’d burst into tears when she died in Godzilla, and she can only faintly remember it. She has lately bemoaned the state of the French film industry, but she shuts down wider conversation about it today. “You have to create from within yourself and not worry about the outside,” she shrugs. I ask about her faith – she is a Christian and has said she reads the Bible every day – and whether it impacts her professional choices. “I try not to separate my life from my work,” she says. “It needs to be one. I believe there is a God up there, but it cannot just be belief. It needs to be concrete for me – real, embodied. Otherwise it is just ideas.” It is similar to what she said about acting – about the freedom she requires from her directors; how she and Fiennes didn’t just act their love stories but felt those love stories. Of course she turned the ordering and consumption of a hot chocolate into a full-bodied performance piece. She’s Juliette Binoche. ‘The Return’ is in cinemas