Vincent Cassel: 'I have to be careful. I might become like Depardieu'

French cinema has found its new golden boy, the charismatic and athletic Vincent Cassel. His latest, controversial film, in which his real-life wife endures a nine-minute rape scene, is set to make him an international star. So whatever happened to Gallic charm?

Every generation, a French actor comes along who generates so much heat that even English-speaking audiences sit up and take notice. In the Fifties and Sixties it was Yves Montand, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon; while the Seventies and Eighties saw the rise of Christophe Lambert, Jean Réno and that colossus of French cinema, Gérard Depardieu. All combined machismo with edgy style and a rare vulnerability. This, you felt, was a man, not just a pin-up. And now it is the turn of Vincent Cassel.

Cassel first burst on to our screens in the 1995 film, La Haine, as a young Jewish skinhead roaming the mean streets of Paris with a stolen police revolver. A searing drama set in the riot-torn banlieues, Mathieu Kassovitz's film changed the face of French cinema overnight – highlighting the disaffection of Paris's ethnic underclass.

As Vinz – macho, hard-eyed, spoiling for a fight – Cassel embodied crude masculinity. It was hard to imagine him in any other role. But it is a testament to Cassel's versatility that he has gone on to appear in over 20 French and international films – taking in romantic comedy (the Hitchcockian thriller, L'Appartement), costume drama (Merchant Ivory's Jefferson in Paris, Elizabeth, Brotherhood of the Wolf) and even cartoons (Cassel voiced Robin Hood in Shrek.) And it can't have hurt his career that he is married to the curvy Italian actress Monica Bellucci. The couple are the darlings of the French media – regarded somewhere between Posh and Becks and Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. But from the start, Cassel was determined not to be typecast. "I'm fighting it all the time," he declares. "In France when you start acting classes, they tell you, 'OK, you are a jeune premier' [young lead]. They give you the names of the characters in Molière you must play, and I always got mad with that."

If a role takes him in a new direction, Cassel will happily accept a cameo – from a part in Ade Edmondson's Guest House Paradiso to Jez Butterworth's Birthday Girl, where he and Kassovitz played the scary cousins of Russian mail-order bride Nicole Kidman. Does he ever worry that he's throwing his talent away? "No, because that's the fun of it. Because acting is a job that is so light and so, in a way, easy, that the only thing left is your choices."

Like Depardieu, Cassel isn't obsessed with playing the romantic lead. Nor is he afraid to play around with his sexuality. As the mincing Duc d'Anjou in Elizabeth, he almost stole the show from Cate Blanchett (just as in 1986 the ultra-macho Depardieu shocked audiences with his role as a gay thief in Bertrand Blier's Tenue de Soirée.) As Cassel sees it: "Acting is such a feminine process, you have to become the desire of others. I'm OK with this, and so is Gérard Depardieu. In many ways he's very feminine." And like Depardieu, Cassel takes risks with controversial un-PC roles. Two years after La Haine, he made the ultra-violent French cyberpunk film, Dobermann, full of missile explosions and casual decapitations. "When it came out in France, people got mad, mad, mad. Once again we heard the words 'fascism' and 'homophobic', But it really was a turning point for French cinema." And now in his latest film, he is taking on the censor again, playing opposite Bellucci, in Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, already infamous for a harrowing nine-minute rape scene.

In the flesh Cassel, 36, is tall, athletic with high cheekbones and very wide-set blue eyes. Not textbook handsome exactly, but sexier for it. No wonder the men's style magazines are queuing up to do fashion shoots with him. But unlike Mathieu Kassovitz, who is a face for cosmetics giant, Lancôme, Cassel has no interest in doing promotions. "I think it's ridiculous the way people sell their things on TV, all that heh, heh, heh [he apes a wolfish grin], all those stupid smiles." So would he never do a Gucci advert? "Well first of all, I'd ask, How much? It's a job. But then even if it's a price we can agree on, it has to be something I can recognise myself in, that I can use. You want to use me, I need to use you. I would never do something topless for a car or a perfume."

On screen Cassel goes out of his way to have fun with his appearance, to explode his celebrity "cool". There are fan sites devoted to the many hairstyles of Vincent Cassel. After the skinhead cut of La Haine, he wore his hair long and curly in L'Appartement, followed by a punk quiff for arch-criminal, Dobermann, and an improbable 18th-century ponytail in Brotherhood of The Wolf. Most recently in Read My Lips, he played the fabulously crumpled ex-con Paul – all lank hair, ferrety moustache and kipper ties – which earned him a César nomination. Cassel recalls: "At our first meeting the director Jacques Audiard said to me, 'Listen, I've seen you in a lot of films, but in this I want you to be unrecognisable. You are better when you are not yourself.' " Indeed Audiard was so determined to play against Cassel's Gallic charm, that a false nose stuffed with toilet paper was created for him which looked suspiciously Depardieu-esque. And yet the effect was oddly appealing – throughout the film there is a wonderful erotic tension between Paul and Emmanuelle Devos's vengeful, hearing-impaired secretary.

In person, Cassel is thoughtful and funny, low on prima-donna attitude. When the hotel laundry service interrupts our interview for the third time with some urgent query about linen, he grits his teeth and intones: "We are working here." The good manners remain, however. But then Cassel is something of an anomaly. He shot to fame playing a working-class skinhead, but in fact he's posh. His mother is a journalist and his father is the acclaimed French actor, Jean-Pierre Cassel, best known to English-speaking audiences for playing Louis XIII in the 1973 version of The Three Musketeers. Cassel junior is open about his privileged background. "When I had my first success in La Haine, the role was very far away from me," he admits. "I'd never lived on the streets. I went to a shit boarding school, very expensive. I'm not a 'projects' boy. But my brother is a very political rapper called Assassin, so in a way we've always been hanging out in the wrong spot. A lot of my friends at the time were from the 'hood but I think people felt that someone really from the projects should do the film, which I thoroughly understood. They said to Mathieu, 'You shouldn't cast Vincent.' And of course he was very excited by that and decided to push for me. But it put a lot of pressure on me because I had to be credible."

Was it hard growing up the son of a famous actor? Cassel laughs. "Well, I think if you decide not to be crushed by that, it can be a very healthy thing. You've got something to fight against. I remember my father telling me, 'It's really good that you're working with Mathieu Kassovitz, but at some point you'll have to work with les grands.' And my argument was, 'What are you talking about? These guys are the future grands. We are the guys you are going to learn from in a few years, I hope.' " So is he flattered by the constant comparisons with Depardieu? "Of course. He's the main influence, he's the guy you want to be as a French actor, he's the equivalent of, say, De Niro in America." "But," he adds, "lately I don't want to do his kind of career any more. I think he's become what he does – almost a parody of himself. I feel like he doesn't care. It's a very good example – I look at him and think, 'OK, I have to be careful or I might become like Gérard Depardieu.' "

Cassel was born in Montmartre, Paris in 1967. His parents were against him becoming an actor, so at the age of 17 he joined a circus school. "I would run from the circus school to the ballet class to the trapeze to tap dancing," he recalls. "I had a lot of energy. But then I hurt myself badly doing acrobatics and suddenly I couldn't do anything any more. So then I moved into acting for real. And I found I knew how to use the space, I knew how to move. Plus I realised many of the actors I love are very physical. They really use the way they walk, the way they pick up a glass, they literally 'incarnate' the character – can you say that in English? You know that 'carne' means the meat, flesh?" In 1991, Cassel landed a small role in Philippe de Broca's Les Clés du Paradis. Two years later he enjoyed his first collaboration with Kassovitz in Métisse, an urban romantic comedy in which he played Kassovitz's older brother, a tough Jewish boxer.

Kassovitz and Cassel have become symbols of the new French wave, trying anything that moves the genre of French cinema on – from the cyberpunk of Dobermann, to the gritty urban policier, The Crimson Rivers or 2001's highly stylised period action-flick, Brotherhood of the Wolf. Both Brotherhood of the Wolf and Amélie (which starred Kassovitz opposite Audrey Tautou) attracted over six million viewers in France and became crossover hits in the US. Cassel says: "Brotherhood of the Wolf is a very important movie because it represents something new. The director Christophe Gans came up with the idea of taking a French legend and making it some kind of really strange, almost Chinese action movie. The result is something that I haven't seen anywhere before." Ironically Cassel nearly turned it down. "When Christian first came to see me, my character was just a regular bad guy – just bad, bad, bad – and I had to say no. But then the script was rewritten so he's secretly in love with his sister. For me, he's a victim, he's suffering more than anyone else in the movie, which is the best excuse for doing terrible things."

Cassel says he always looks for ambiguity in a role. "It can be a problem, because today a lot of big American movies don't like ambiguity, and I can't fit. I don't mind playing a baddie, but he has to be quite complex. I was cast in the American movie The Sin Eater and it lasted two days! I agreed to do the role thinking that, until halfway through the movie, you wouldn't know who's the bad guy, who's the good guy. It came to the end of the first day and they said, 'But it's not clear. You can't do that.' So I said, 'Well in that case you've cast the wrong person,' and dropped out of the movie."

He is far more excited about reuniting with Dobermann director Jan Kounen for Blueberry – a shamanic Western shot in Mexico with Michael Madsen, Juliette Lewis and Eddie Izzard, out this year – and he's about to start filming on The Pretender opposite Sean Penn. Meanwhile he has begun directing. "I've made two short movies. The first frame I directed, I thought even if I die today, I've done something with my life – and it's not a feeling I've ever had as an actor."

But there's a danger Cassel's other work will be overshadowed by this month's release of Irreversible. He plays Marcus, a man who embarks on a psychotic quest to avenge the rape of his girlfriend Alex (Bellucci). The film is told backwards, starting with one of the most graphic murders ever seen on screen and ending with a scene of extraordinary beauty, emphasising all the couple have lost. Some critics have dismissed the film as "directionless machismo", but director Noé insists the film is shot entirely from a woman's point of view. (Interestingly both the British Board of Film Classification and the charity Rape Crisis agree it conveys the brutality of rape, and is not designed to titillate.)

Meanwhile Cassel and Bellucci have supported Noé's vision at film festivals across the world, claiming that Bellucci was in no way traumatised by filming. In fact, says Cassel, the hardest part for him to film was the lovemaking scene because of its intimacy. He wasn't on set for the filming of the controversial nine-minute anal rape but during our interview he reveals that the subway floor, on which the attack takes place, was made of rubber, that Noé lay on the floor at Monica's level during filming, and that the rapist's penis was added using computer-generated imaging. "Monica said, 'Oh that's great, it looks much more real.'"

Isn't there a risk their motives will be misunderstood or hijacked? "Yes I'm sure there is," Cassel agrees. "But you need to take those risks, because otherwise what do you do? Pearl Harbor or The Mummy? Even if you're angry after a movie, it's better than just going to McDonald's and forgetting about it. I recently saw Passolini's Salò. I'll never watch the movie again, but thank God that guy made the movie. I will never, never forget it."

I suggest there are links between Irreversible and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut because they both explore sexual jealousy. Cassel becomes very animated. "I love that film. I saw it on DVD on my own and then I called my wife and said, 'We have to watch this movie together.' The end where Nicole Kidman says, 'There's one thing we have to do – go home and fuck.' It's the bravest thing, can you believe it? And it's the last thing Kubrick told the world before he died, 'Let's fuck.' And it's true, the most important thing in the world is to procreate, that's what we're programmed for. The rest is just how to get there, I guess."

'Irreversible' is released on 31 January