Camille Cottin’s breakout came in 2013 with Connasse—that’s French for “asshole”—an unscripted comedy series that used hidden cameras to document the stereotypical Parisienne Camilla behaving scandalously in public. Broadcast biweekly on Canal+, these 90-second sketches travelled, somewhat unsurprisingly, viral. In 2015, Connasse went to London for a film spin-off, and Cottin was arrested while scaling the gates of Kensington Palace in heels (her character was determined to meet Prince Harry). Her performance was so convincing that for some time, people seemed genuinely unsure whether she was really good at playing the clown, or just a really terrible person. Meeting the comic powerhouse settles the question immediately—Cottin is a warm and thoughtful conversationalist.
Our discussion for hube wanders from childhood imagination to the failures of the French justice system, the power of embracing difference, expanding Hollywood’s limited gaze, and the pleasure and power that come with pursuing what you want.
hube: The ability to act is often perceived as something innate—a gift or a natural ability. When did you first feel this talent awakening in you?
Camille Cottin: Picasso said that every child is an artist, the problem is remaining an artist when you grow up. As a child, I loved playing with my imagination, creating other worlds, being someone else, and doing it with friends. Together, we would all jump into a world we had invented and become people we had created out of our own imagination. That gave me a lot of excitement and a lot of joy. Later, when I understood that this could be a job, that you could actually get paid to do it, I thought, this is definitely what I want to do—there is nothing else I want to do.
The funny thing is that I thought I was really made for it, and then I started taking theatre lessons—it was so difficult. My voice wouldn’t come out, my body was all stiff. I really wasn’t the actress I had thought I would be. I had to work a lot to build the technique, to understand what it meant to be an actress, to act. There was a little shock between the actress I thought I was, from, let’s say, five years old until seventeen, and the actress I turned out to be.
