Guillaume Marbeck poses during a photocall for the film “Nouvelle Vague” in Cannes, France, May 18, 2025.Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters
All along the main boulevard of the Cannes Film Festival, there are clusters of young men in tuxedos and women in cocktail dresses, sweating under the French Riviera sun and holding signs reading, “Tickets SVP.”
Sometimes, these hopeful cinephiles will score a last-minute admission to a world premiere, but more often than not they spend the entire day doing nothing much but crossing their fingers.
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Guillaume Marbeck knows the feeling well, having not too long ago gone the begging route on the Croisette. But today, the French actor is on the other side of the Cannes divide, and in the biggest way possible.
In the new Richard Linklater film, Nouvelle Vague, which chronicles the making of the 1960 French classic Breathless, Marbeck plays the very godfather of French cinema, Jean-Luc Godard. What’s more, it is the actor’s first ever on-screen role.
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The afternoon after the world premiere of Nouvelle Vague, Marbeck sat down with The Globe and Mail high above the hopeful ticket-seekers on the rooftop terrace of a Cannes hotel to talk about just how far he’s come.
There is a lot of “Cannes” content in the film, including scenes set at the festival. It must have been something of a surreal, meta-contextual experience to watch the film while at Cannes itself.
When you hear in the movie Godard say, while in Paris, “Why am I still here? Everybody is in Cannes!” and then we see Cannes on-screen while there, it was a really unique experience. This is what every person who works in cinema dreams of. And it’s only my first movie! So how could it be better?
And for your first movie, you also have the entire legacy of French cinema on your shoulders. Did you walk into the premiere with any trepidation or nerves?
There was a lot of history around this movie, but when you look close at it, it was just a bunch of people who liked cinema. It was Jean-Luc, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg. They were nobodies then, so there was nothing to lose. But going on the red carpet, it’s just a bonus. I made my first film and now I’m selected to play Cannes. This is crazy. I used to work in the Marche du Cannes, buying movies for France and England for small distributors. And when my day was finished, I would wear my ratty smoking jacket, and try to get tickets. I used to hold a piece of paper and saying, “Hey, please, I guarantee you 100 per cent I will go to this movie!”
Were you ever successful?
Yeah, of course! Okay, here are my tricks. So you have to be at the right entrance, where the people are going to get their tickets scanned. You have to be dressed up to meet the dress code. And you have to have the right poster with the right movie written on it, be specific. Ticket-holders, if they don’t use the ticket, they get a penalty or something, so a lot are ready to give it to you for free. If you’re at the right place and at the right moment, you can get it. It’s a hassle, you have to ask everybody. But the more you do it, the better you get at it.
Amazing. I’m of course, though, very curious about your own personal relationship to Godard growing up. Was he a staple of your cinematic education?
I studied at a cinema school in Paris, and then one year in New York and then L.A., so Godard is obviously one of the main characters of cinema history. You couldn’t ignore his movies. I remember, though, watching Pierrot le Fou with my friend in our 20s, and at the end of the movie, he said, “I don’t understand this movie.” And I told him, “Yeah, I felt the same way,” but maybe we were too young to see this! I watched it later on and felt, “Oh, yes, I see it differently now.”
How did you move into acting?
In my last year of studying behind the camera in the U.S., I had the chance to work with young American actors, and they were very talented. Which is when I realized that I was a very untalented director. So I came back to France, started to look for acting classes, and then once I put my finger on it, I put myself on the internet, Instagram, and luckily I got an e-mail from a casting director. She liked a video I made, and said I had the same energy as Godard. Would I audition for Richard Linklater?
I would just assume that would be a scam.
I thought so, yes! But I also thought, if this is true, this is the only shot I’m going to have in my entire life. I had six months to prepare once I got the job, and it was important to try and not mimic Godard, but interpret him in a precise way. To have every gesture, sound, the way he would think about something. If you’re going to portray somebody who is admired by all of the cinema community, you’re going to do your work. I needed to give the maximum respect.
With Jean-Luc having died in 2022, does that make you sad he won’t watch this? Or relief that he’s not around to critique it? How do you reconcile those feelings, while admiring him so much?
It’s hard, because you’re never going to know if he would like it or not. It’s like a prayer. Okay, I hope I did it right. I hope you’re not mad at me! I don’t want the god of cinema to curse me for the rest of my career.
