Juliette Binoche On ‘The Taste Of Things’ & Working With Food, Her Celebrated Career, And The Star She Thought Deserved The Oscar She Won – The Actor’s Side

Juliette Binoche is a true international star whose career has spanned decades of memorable performances on stage and screen. She won an Oscar, a BAFTA and many other honors for her role in 1996’s The English Patient, and holds the record as being the only female to win Best Actress honors in all three main European film festivals: Cannes, Venice and Berlin. Her numerous films include The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Chocolat, Camille Claudel, Godzilla, Certified Copy, Damage and countless others. On Broadway, she was nominated for Best Actress for Betrayal in 2001 and has appeared on stages from London to Paris and throughout Europe among many other highlights in her career. She will also be starring as Coco Chanel in Apple’s upcoming series The New Look.

Binoche joins me for this week’s edition of my Deadline video series The Actor’s Side where we talk about her remarkable career as well as her current triumph on screen The Taste of Things. The official French entry for the Academy Awards was a critically acclaimed hit at this year’s Cannes Film Festival that has once again put Binoche in the conversation for another Oscar nomination. In it, she plays an extraordinary cook involved in a complex romantic relationship with a man (played by Benoit Magimel) whose lives are linked to their common passion for cooking and French gastronomy in particular.

Binoche talks about what went into the role that involved so much food; the effect of working with Magimel, who in real life she was very much involved with at one time and who is the father of her daughter; the numerous distinct roles she has played; and notably relives her Oscar win and acceptance speech in which she so graciously pointed to Lauren Bacall who was widely expected to win. Binoche tells me if she could have gone back into the audience and handed the Oscar to Bacall, she would have done it. But, with a wide and varied career as proof, she also discusses why she does like to live in the past or the future, rather only for what she is doing in the present.

To watch our conversation and to get “the actor’s side” of things from Juliette Binoche, click on the video above.

Join me every Wednesday during Oscar season for another edition of The Actor’s Side.