Isabelle Huppert Would Love to Play a ‘Real Villain,’ Even in a Marvel Movie

Isabelle Huppert is open to expanding her already storied filmography to potentially even include one of the world’s biggest franchises: Marvel.

The Oscar winner said she would love to join the ranks of fellow Academy Award winners Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett as Marvel baddies, telling The Guardian that she would “love to” join a genre project, including the MCU, as a “real villain.” Even though it’s not like she hasn’t played malevolent women before.

“I would love to! I’d love to do a genre film,” the “Piano Teacher” actress said. “It must be nice maybe to be the villain, a real villain, not the villain in most of the films I do, who have a good reason to be a villain. I never get to play a pure villain.”

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Huppert also reflected on her collaborations with Michael Haneke and “Elle” filmmaker Paul Verhoeven as highlights, movies where her characters skirt the line between hero and villain.

“I never think I am doing something fearlessly, or that it requires a certain amount of anxiety. I trust cinema in general,” Huppert said. “That gives you a lot of protection from everything. It takes you away from fear, from all that — I have to say — bullshit that people imagine you have to deal with when you do a movie like this. When you do a movie with, say, Michael Haneke or Paul Verhoeven, they are people I trust enough to give me confidence. I feel completely safe. I know exactly what I am doing. As a spectator, I can imagine that people think the actors are particularly exposed because that is what the movie is about. But that is the film. It is not me doing the film.”

She said her filmography has always been rooted in complicated leading roles that avoid cliches around women on screen.

“From the beginning, that was a conscious choice, but at the same time I had no choice, because I was never really asked to be the woman sitting behind the man, the woman giving value to the man,” Huppert said. “You have to be a certain type of woman [to be that]. That was never my case, so in a way, the only place I could take was the main place. Which was fine.”

Huppert previously told IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio that she selects projects based on the “dialogue with a director” and their compatibility as collaborators. Huppert mused on the ramifications of leading a TV series and working with a slew of filmmakers instead of a singular auteur.

“I still believe in this, and I hope that doesn’t become obsolete, because that’s not what you have when you make a series, where you have different looks. At the end of the day, do you have one look, because you have several directors?” Huppert said. “I’m not saying it’s against cinema but, certainly, do you have a vision, a very personal vision of the film? You have the vision of a script, of a screenwriter, a series of events, a series of good scenes, but do you have an aesthetic vision? For me, that remains the definition of moviemaking. That’s what I look for, a director. It’s the original, visionary point of view that makes me willing to do it, but also possible for me to do it, because it relies on trust and confidence, and I can only trust people like them.”