“Sorry, my apologies,” says Daniel Auteuil. “A parrot just landed on my head.”

Did I hear that right?

We’re doing the interview over Zoom, without video, and in French — not my strongest language. Our translator sounds equally uncertain.

“I’m not sure I understand,” she says carefully. “Apparently there’s a parrot?”

Auteuil switches on the camera. And there it is: a grey parrot perched squarely atop his head, utterly at home.

“It’s because of all my gray hair,” he says, laughing. “She thinks it’s her nest.”

The image feels oddly perfect. One of the giants of French cinema sitting calmly beneath a bird that has mistaken him for part of the furniture.

For more than five decades, Auteuil has occupied a singular place in French cinema. He has been a broad comedy star, a romantic lead, a physically transformative character actor and, in films like Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), a master of near-unnerving minimalism. He is one of the very few actors of his generation who could move effortlessly between popular mainstream hits and severe auteur cinema without seeming out of place in either.

He is one the most-nominated actor in this history of the César Awards, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, with 14 nominations (Catherine Deneuve has 11), and two best actor wins.

And yet, outside France and the festival circuit, especially for those under 50, his name still produces blank stares. Unlike Gérard Depardieu, Jean Reno or even Jean Dujardin, Auteuil rose to and has remained at the summit of French cinema without ever really crossing over into Hollywood.

“It’s true,” he says with a shrug. “I shot movies in Italy and in England with my bad English, but I never went to Hollywood. At least not yet.”

That “not yet” hangs in the air with characteristic Auteuil ambiguity — part wistfulness, part mischief, entirely noncommittal.

At 76, he arrives at this year’s Cannes Film Festival with two films premiering on the Croisette, one as an actor, one as a director. It’s roughly his 15th appearance at the festival. He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the defining faces of modern Cannes. Yet he remains, to most English-speaking audiences, effectively undiscovered.

For devoted Auteuil fans, his lack of an international profile is genuinely puzzling. He is a formidable quadruple threat: actor, writer, director and singer. (He got his start as a cast member on the French tour of Godspell and, in 2023, aged 71, released his first album of chansons.) His range across more than 120 films and TV appearances is staggering. He has worked with André Téchiné and Michael Haneke, with Agnès Varda, Claude Berri and Claude Sautet. He starred opposite Catherine Deneuve in My Favorite Season (1993) and Thieves (1996) — “my sister of cinema,” he calls her — and alongside Romy Schneider in The Lady Banker (1980). “A small role,” he says of the Schneider film. “But what a joy to play with one of the greatest actresses in the world.”

None of it was inevitable.

At 19, Auteuil was rejected three times by France’s National Academy of Dramatic Arts, the kind of early failure that ends many acting careers before they begin.

“But I didn’t have a Plan B, so I had to stick it out,” he says. “I think that’s the strength of youth. You’re completely unaware of the risk. Giving up was never part of my plan.”

For years, he drifted through musical theater, television and minor film roles before his commercial breakthrough arrived in 1980 with Les sous-doués (The Under-Gifted), Claude Zidi’s blockbuster French teen comedy about schoolkids cheating their way through the baccalaureate exams.

“It made me famous,” Auteuil recalls. “But people thought I was light. I knew I could do other things. But nobody asks you for what they cannot imagine.”

The first director to imagine something else was Claude Berri.

He cast Auteuil in his period epic Jean de Florette (1986), playing Ugolin — a stooped, obsessive farmer ultimately destroyed by his own stunted capacity for love. It was a complete physical reinvention. “When I saw myself made up as Ugolin, I thought: ‘Finally, people won’t recognize me,’ ” says Auteuil. “He really changed my stature, the way people looked at me as an actor.”

The performance earned him both a BAFTA and a César and established him as a dramatic actor.

Another performer might have continued down that path — outward, demonstrative, physically transformational performances akin to the style of his Jean de Florette co-star Depardieu. Perhaps that would have led to similar international success. Four years after Jean de Florette, Depardieu was playing alongside Andie MacDowell in Peter Weir’s Green Card.

Auteuil moved in the opposite direction.

“I’m afraid I’m not much of a dreamer. I’m very pragmatic,” he says. “I never chose roles thinking about my career. It was always about my desire to spend time with a certain director, with certain actors. It was always about the work.”

That instinct led him to Sautet, and to the performances that would ultimately define him.

If Zidi made Auteuil famous and Berri made him respected, Sautet made him great.

His performance in A Heart in Winter (1992) remains one of the defining works of modern French cinema. As Stéphane, a violin restorer broken inside and emotionally incapable of love, Auteuil does almost nothing outwardly. The performance lives in tiny hesitations, fleeting glances and emotional refusals. He withholds so completely that the audience leans toward him, searching for signs of feeling.

Working with the director transformed his entire approach to acting. The extroverted performer of the early comedies gave way to something quieter and far more difficult: an actor capable of building scenes around silence, withholding and microscopic emotional shifts.

“Claude Sautet really changed my acting, from extrovert acting to introvert acting,” says Auteuil. “It was a major step for me.”

He would return to that same radical interiority years later in Haneke’s Caché, playing Georges Laurent, a successful Paris TV host whose carefully controlled bourgeois life begins to unravel as a dark secret from his past resurfaces. Auteuil’s performance is a master class of moral opacity. His Georges is so psychologically sealed off that even his own guilt seems inaccessible to him. Caché premiered in Cannes, winning best director and the international critics prize.

“Together, it was these three Claudes — Claude Zidi, Claude Berri and Claude Sautet — that made my career,” says Auteuil. “They made me comfortable doing everything: comedy, drama, playing open or playing closed and mysterious.”

That flexibility may also help explain why Auteuil has never fully translated internationally. He never built a singular exportable persona in the way Depardieu or Reno did. There is no “Daniel Auteuil type.” His career is defined by mutation, not branding.

It’s notable that Auteuil drew more attention stateside last year, playing Jodie Foster’s ex-husband, with crackling chemistry between them, in Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, than he did from dozens of acclaimed roles across the past two decades of French cinema.

“Working with Jodie Foster was wonderful,” he says. “She’s very generous but also very demanding. I think we have the same way of working. We’re like little soldiers — we just want to do the work.”

Foster, notably, speaks fluent French.

“What I’d need,” Auteuil jokes, “is for all my favorite American actors to speak French!”

Until then, Cannes remains his natural habitat.

He remembers arriving on the Croisette as a young unknown, wandering freely between screenings and cafés in a festival that felt less militarized, less consumed by celebrity branding and influencer culture.

“There was less security. You could just drop into a screening or walk along the beach,” he recalls. “Things have changed. Now you have fashion and YouTubers everywhere. But it remains the biggest film festival in the world. The greatest celebration of cinema.”

His defining Cannes moment came in 1996, when he shared the festival’s best actor prize with Pascal Duquenne for The Eighth Day, directed by Jaco Van Dormael, in which he played a driven businessman transformed by his friendship with a man with Down syndrome. “I accepted the award from the hands of [jury president] Francis Ford Coppola himself! A very, very happy moment,” he says, grinning. 

Two years ago, the legal drama An Ordinary Case, which he directed and co-wrote, was accepted for an out of competition slot. “That was the first time I was celebrated [in Cannes] as a director. It was equally beautiful and important. Awards matter. But what really matters, for me, is to do the job.”

This Cannes, Auteuil is on double duty and operating in two entirely different registers, itself a kind of demonstration of the range that has defined his career. He’s starring in Crescendo, a fun and frothy dramedy directed by Agnès Jaoui, from Studiocanal, screening out of competition, playing a hapless opera conductor trying to navigate the French arts scene in the post-#MeToo era. Crescendo plays in a register unique to French cinema, mixing light, silly comedy — there’s a repeated joke involving huge, phallus-shaped columns — with an attempt, sans finger-wagging, to address serious issues of sexism, racism and workplace abuse.

“Both my parents worked in opera. I grew up in that world, so the story is very personal to me,” says Auteuil. “I crossed paths with a lot of conductors, who really inspired me for the role. A lot of memories and emotions came to the surface.”

In sharp contrast is When the Night Falls, Auteuil’s sixth film as a director, screening in the Cannes Premiere section this year. It’s a sombre, Holocaust-era period drama about the real-life effort, in 1942, to save 100 Jewish children from a deportation camp outside Lyon. It follows Gilbert Lesage (played by BPM and Anatomy of a Fall actor Antoine Reinartz), the young civil servant tasked with determining the fate of Jews arrested by the Vichy regime who tries, with the aid of Catholic priest Alexandre Glasberg, to save the children. Auteuil, who co-wrote the script with Camille Lugan, plays Glasberg.

“It’s a story of suffering,” Auteuil says. “About the children trapped in 1942 because of the Vichy laws. But it also echoes the suffering done to children now, to migrant children around the world. It’s also a bureaucratic thriller, because the fate of these 100 children is decided by numbers, by their cases and files — it’s very abstract, the way their fate is decided. I wanted to tell this story because I thought, 70 years after the Holocaust, we would have become intelligent enough to act differently. But of course we haven’t. Unfortunately, history is repeating itself. This is my way of talking about today through this real story in history.”

Directing, like so much else in Auteuil’s career, came through persistence rather than plan.

He first attempted to direct was as a young theater actor, staging a play by Pierre de Marivaux.

“It was called The Island of Slaves, and it failed so badly it made me sick to my stomach,” he recalls. “When I was 30, I tried to direct another play, and it was better, but it still wasn’t good.”

By then, his acting career was taking off. “I had a lot of offers to make movies, I simply didn’t have time to direct. So if you asked me why I came to directing late, it is because I got caught up with my success as an actor. But I also needed time, time to find my own style, my own point of view. And I found it. I found it a bit late, but I found it.”

After five decades in cinema, Daniel Auteuil speaks less like a filmmaker reflecting on a legacy than one still trying to move forward, eager for the next opportunity “to do some work.”

There is one enemy, however, that still troubles him.

“Nostalgia,” he says. “Longing for the past. This is my biggest enemy. It presents itself sometimes in very sweet ways, through little details that seem beautiful. But what I want is to prepare the future in the present.”

The parrot has since moved from Auteuil’s head to a perch on his shoulder, nibbling at his ear with complete proprietary confidence.

He barely seems to notice.