Matthias Schoenaerts: who says Belgians are boring?

If last year’s breakout star was Jean Dujardin, whom no one outside France had heard of before The Artist, for which he won best actor at the Oscars, this year it’s Matthias Schoenaerts, who is 34, smart and sensitive, with an action-hero physique.

He is already a star in his native Belgium, but his astonishing performance in one of the most anticipated films of the autumn will almost certainly ensure that soon we will all know his name — and we might even know how to spell it.

Rust and Bone, Jacques Audiard’s follow-up to A Prophet, picked up the best film award at the London Film Festival last month and had a rapturous reception at its Cannes Film Festival premiere. In it, Schoenaerts plays Ali, a nomadic, monosyllabic single father and bare-knuckle fighter, who becomes the lover of Stéphanie (played by Marion Cotillard) after a horrific accident while training killer whales at a marine centre leads to her having both legs amputated at the knee.

Cotillard was bowled over by his performance. At a press conference at Cannes, she said: ‘Matthias is an outstanding actor, like DiCaprio or Day-Lewis. He’s of that ilk. He launches himself into a project. He’s an actor who becomes totally committed to a part — and then there’s the talent. There are no words to explain it.’

I mention this to Schoenaerts, as he lounges on a sofa in a loose black T-shirt, jeans and trainers in a north London photographic studio, and his blue-grey eyes twinkle. ‘You don’t want to know how much I paid Marion to say that! My entire fee for Rust and Bone went to her,’ he says. ‘When Marion came on board I knew Rust and Bone was going to be something else. I’d seen La Vie en Rose and I knew I’d better be prepared. I’ve got Jacques and I’ve got Marion, they’re gonna eat me alive! So it was quite amazing to hear Marion say such a thing, that’s for sure. At the same time, it’s kinda scary. You don’t want to disappoint people. It’s an enormous compliment, but it’s not going to help me become a better actor.’

Cotillard isn’t the only one ready to heap praise on Schoenaerts. The New York Times recently described him as ‘the most versatile beefcake actor of our time’. And when he won the FIPRESCI Award for best actor at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January for his performance in the Oscar-nominated Bullhead, in which he plays a cattle farmer with a steroid addiction, the jury praised his ‘superb portrayal of an innocent and sensitive man trapped in a truculent body’. In order to bulk up for that role he ate more than 3,000 tins of tuna and hundreds of chickens, and worked out every day for a year. It was the intensity of his performance that first caught the attention of Jacques Audiard.

In Rust and Bone, which was loosely adapted from characters in the short-story collection of the same name by Canadian author Craig Davidson, the narrative tilts back and forth between the violence of the bare-knuckle fights (‘We rehearsed those scenes a couple of thousand times; they were extremely well choreographed or I’d have been hospitalised very quickly’) and the passion between Ali and Stéphanie. Some of the most moving moments involve them having sex after her accident; she wants to know if she still can, he doesn’t make a fuss about her new disability.

With such an unusual and dramatic love story, and as Schoenaerts is known for immersing himself entirely in his roles, did he find himself falling for Cotillard? His eyes twinkle a little more brightly. ‘To some extent, of course. These things happen.’ He stops teasing. ‘I’m pretty sure that Marion and I approach acting in a similar way. We both try to be intuitive. I have the impression that she’s always seriously prepared. And incredibly meticulous. You’re very vulnerable as an actor, particularly in a film like this. It’s about having a circle of trust with your fellow actors. And with your director. Jacques’ film set is a madhouse. It’s intense and it’s fun and it’s intense fun.’

The reviews of Rust and Bone have been overwhelmingly positive, and it looks likely that Schoenaerts’ career will be transformed. Straight after shooting it in France, he flew to America to film Blood Ties, which also stars Cotillard and is directed by her long-term partner Guillaume Canet. Next year he is also appearing in The Loft, with Karl Urban.

The son of Belgian actor Julien Schoenaerts, Matthias was kicked out of film school at 19 for being lazy and at 21 started at drama school in Antwerp. Bizarrely, while he enjoyed his time there, he never considered the future. ‘I watched endless films as a child — everything you could think of, from Loach to Lynch — but I never saw a career in acting coming. At a certain point people started telling me to go to America but I was never interested in hanging out in Hollywood. I never chased anything. Everything came naturally.