Alessandro as 'Boy' with Coco (Audrey Tatou) in Coco Before Chanel

We at Sound Screen were delighted to be offered fifteen minutes with the ravishing Alessandro Nivola, who plays Arthur Capel (’Boy’), Coco Chanel’s love interest in Anne Fontaine’s period French drama about the fashion designer’s early life. Coco Before Chanel is released on DVD and Blu-ray this week.

Tell people that haven’t seen the film about your character Boy.
AN: “He was a real person in the life of Chanel. He had been an orphan child, an Englishman who had made a fortune in investing in coal in Newcastle during the industrial revolution. He reinvented himself as an international polo-playing, Scott Joplin-playing waltz-dancing spiv who seduced Chanel and stole her from one of his closest friends. Although he married someone else but carried on having an affair with Chanel for three years after he was married, up until he was killed in a car accident. Apparently he was the love of her life and a big influence on her life and fashion designs; he financed some of her early fashion endeavours and allowed her to be an autonomous woman who never had to look to others to finance herself.”

What about the character attracted you to the role?
AN: “Apart from the fact that he was described as the sexiest man alive… ! I think the story of their relationship, which doesn’t really take off until he tells Chanel he’s going to marry someone else, is pretty unusual for a period drama. It wouldn’t have happened in a Jane Austen film. I felt it gave the movie a kind of modernity, that it would be a new take on a period romance.”

Did you know much about Chanel’s life before you started the film?
AN: “No, most of what I know about her life was from reading the script and research building up to filming. I still don’t know much about what happened after [the period the movie covers was over], I know that she became incredibly famous and rich and had affairs with a bunch of Nazis! I was surprised to discover how traumatic her early life was; I didn’t know she’d come from this impoverished background, it was all news to me and very interesting.”

You’re playing an Englishman who knows French, you knew nothing of Chanel’s early life before the film and you weren’t alive during the time it happened – were these big, exciting challenges for you to take on?
AN: “You know that show called Faking It? That’s what it was like! I felt like I was hurled into some world I knew nothing about and expected to be convincing at it in a matter of a few weeks. It was shit scary, my French wasn’t very good; I hired a tutor but even once we started filming I didn’t know what people were saying to me, I’d hardly written a horse before and I was meant to be this world-champion polo player. These Argentine horsemen made me ride around set for two weeks, my thighs were so swollen I could hardly walk – there was no room for my bollocks inbetween them! It was a huge challenge for me, I like putting myself in uncomfortable positions, being out of my comfort zone gives me adrenaline but this was a step further than I’d ever gone.”

Coco and Boy share a romantic on-screen kiss. Black Sabbath was on the stereo.

Audrey, as I’m sure you know, is an amazingly accomplished French actress, did you know her before filming and how was your relationship on set?
AN: “I didn’t know her at all. I knew Amélie, obviously. She turned out to be completely the opposite to what she appears to be as a star and actress in terms of her previous roles. I think she turned out to be much more like Coco actually, she’s not from a posh family and doesn’t have a refined way of talking, she’s very earthy and colloquial. She’s a tough-minded girl, very bright and ambitious, she knows what she wants and is no-one’s fool. She’s not the kind of delicate creature she has seemed in the past. I was lucky it was her because she’d done some movies in English and her English isn’t so great so she’d had the same experience as me in reverse and was endlessly sympathetic about it.”

Coco Before Chanel was filmed over two years ago, what emotions come up for you when you look back and talk about it now?
AN: “I remember wanting to quit acting at the end of every work day! It always seemed like a mountain too high to climb. I was calling home to my wife on the verge of tears on a nightly basis. At the same time I was getting to live in this amazing apartment in Paris, immersed in a veritably French film set (I was the only American there); I couldn’t have had a more authentic experience. Plus I got to finish the movie with another language. At the time I remember feeling a lot of fear and a lot of exhilaration at the same time… an experience I may not repeat! But I wouldn’t have traded it.”

Can you tell us what you’re up to at the moment yourself and what we can see you in next?
AN: “After Coco Before Chanel I filmed a movie about the obscenity trial over the Allen Ginsberg poem, Howl, with James Franco. Then I just finished this film called Janie Jones, about a rock singer who discovers he has a 12 year old daughter from a one-night stand he had. The daughter is played by Abigail Breslin and I play the rock star dad. He’s a drunk punk rock guy, who is a total wreck. I’m now going to do a Sam Shepard’s play A Lie of the Mind in New York, directed by Ethan Hawke. Theatre is how I began but it’s been a while.. but hey, after speaking French anything will seem a walk in the park!”

Coco Before Chanel is out now on DVD and Blu-ray via Optimum Releasing

By Cathy Reay