Marion Cotillard Is Better Than You

Marion Cotillard is the most beautiful person in the world right now. And if her new interview with Nicole Kidman in Interview Magazine is to be believed, she’s also the best person. Let’s just give up.

The thing about Marion Cotillard is she’s jealousy-proof. Because she won. The war is over. She is Queen Pretty and all the rest of us are her hideous minions. There’s no point in being jealous of her because it’s not like we’re going to find an eyeshadow duo that’s going to push us across the line into Marion Cotillard territory. In that way, Marion Cotillard brings the world together.

But Marion Cotillard is more than just the most beautiful face! As we learn from a new long interview she did with her Nine co-star Nicole Kidman in the latest Interview Magazine, Marion Cotillard is also trying to save a forest in the Congo, playing all of the instruments in disguise in a friend’s band, invented caring about the environment, and “would love to go into an animal’s dream – like a lion’s or a cat’s.”

The whole thing is a festival of one actress blowing smoke up the ass of another, though, granted, that’s Interview‘s entire purpose. It should basically be called “Blowing Smoke Magazine.” (Example question from Kidman: “How did this become your passion, this desire to protect the Earth?”) But even knowing that I have to say I was disappointed in the two actress’s seriousness — there isn’t even a drop of humor or self-awareness in the whole entire thing! Both of them make me long for the down-home disarming humor and humility of Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP Newsletter. Again, Interview has a certain style where nobody but, say, John Waters, comes off sounding like anything other than the world’s most self-absorbed humorless jerk, but I was on a Marion Cotillard kick after seeing Inception, and even when you take the language thing into account, I guess I was expecting a little more respect for her audience than stuff like this:

COTILLARD: I think searching is a beautiful thing. There is this thought that goes, If you search and search and stop searching, then ultimately you’ll find what you need. But I think maybe if you don’t search you wouldn’t have the experience of searching and then won’t find it at all. You have to search first, if you know what I mean. It’s the experience of living. We can have one experience that can change our whole lives. I saw a documentary recently about a guy who was attacked by a shark. He was very injured and almost died. After this, he went all over the world killing sharks. Then an even bigger fear entered his mind: “I have killed so many of them. If I go on killing sharks, maybe one day they will all disappear.” The fear of his being responsible for the extinction of sharks made him change, and he then became a defender of sharks.

KIDMAN: Wow.

And the whole thing is like that! Yeah, I don’t know why I was going into a Marion Cotillard interview expecting Bill Murray, either, but Marion Cotillard: you just stay pretty.