Kristin Scott Thomas stars in Ralph Fiennes’ new film, The Invisible Woman. Kristin hasn’t done a lot of promotion for it, nor does she ever do that much promotion. She’ll do a few red carpets and a handful of interviews, for sure, and it’s not like she’s completely MIA, but she’s never oversaturated. Kristin likes to withhold a bit, and that’s what makes her glamorous and interesting, still, to this day (at least to me). Anyway, this isn’t the biggest celebrity news breaking this week, but Kristin’s newish Guardian interview is FULL of fascinating quotes – you can read the full thing here. She says that she’s pretty much done with acting, she shades Hollywood AND France (which is where she’s lived for years) pretty hard and she’s not into voting at all.

She doesn’t want to work anymore: “I just suddenly thought, I cannot cope with another film. I realised I’ve done the things I know how to do so many times in different languages, and I just suddenly thought, I can’t do it anymore. I’m bored by it. So I’m stopping. The kinds of films that I do are usually quite rapidly put together, and it always seems to be a little bit of a shambles. I like filming, but what I don’t like is having to rearrange things and rewrite scenes. I just can’t be bothered. I’m often asked to do something because I’m going to be a sort of weight to their otherwise flimsy production. They need me for production purposes, basically. So they give me a little role in something where they know I’m going to be able to turn up, know what to do, cry in the right place. I shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds, but I keep doing these things for other people, and last year I just decided life’s too short. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

Walking away from Hollywood in the 1990s: “It was geographically unfriendly, because I just didn’t want to go to America.” She was married to a Frenchman, had two young children, and the family wanted to live in France or, at the very least, Europe.

She hates big productions: “No, it’s also that I can’t bear all the kind of rubbish that goes on on those big films. I just can’t stand sitting around for hours in a great big luxury trailer, waiting, bored out of my head. I used to do… a lot of tapestry. Yes, I had a lot of cushions around.” She did have one minor relapse five years ago when she appeared in the airhead comedy Confessions Of A Shopaholic, but at its mention her face freezes in a pantomime of horror. “I thought it would be quite good fun. But I spent my entire time waiting. I hated it, hated it, hated it, and I said that I wouldn’t do another one.” Grinning, she adds, “Funnily enough, I haven’t been asked to.”

Aging: “I’m sort of, as the French would say, ‘stuck between two chairs’, because I’m no longer 40 and sort of a seductress, and I’m not yet a granny.”

Movies about young people: “Well. I don’t want to go and see a film about young people. I’m just not remotely interested. When I go to the movies, I’d rather watch people who’ve lived, who have gone through the mill, who’ve had their heart broken a million times and are still looking for love. That’s what’s interesting to me… I just think there really need to be stories about people who have been through life and are still hopeful.”

She would never do something like Downton Abbey: “I can’t do miniseries. Once you’ve got the characters, once you know who they are, they’re going to repeat themselves, aren’t they, for the next five years? It just goes on and on and on. I get terribly bored. Series bore me.”

Typecast as the gloomy woman: “I’m asked to do the same things over and over, because people know you can do that, so they want you to do that. But I just don’t want to pretend to be unhappy any more – and it is mostly unhappy.”

She got a divorce a few years ago & her kids are growing up: “I’m starting to think, hang on a minute, soon my youngest is going to go off and do whatever he’s going to do. But this is what’s quite fun about being me at the moment – making one’s own choices, for reasons of one’s own, and not trying to please a career person, or make money. I guess that’s a sign of maturity, I think.” She and her ex-husband share joint custody of their youngest son, and although that makes life “much more complicated – you have to make appointments to talk to the father of your child, which is a bore”, relations are amicable. “I know for so many people it hasn’t turned out right, and they can’t get the other partner to engage, and that sounds like hell. But I’ve been very, very lucky. Married the right man, had babies with the right man.”

Possibly returning to England after living in France: “I think so [France is in decline]. Everyone says it is, and it’s quite believable. Five years ago, I would have said great schools, great education, great transport, trains are wonderful, roads are great, all that kind of thing – great, great, great. You can’t really say that any more. And at the moment I’m really worried about the rise of antisemitism in France, which is just really unbelievable.” Someone, she says, has got to stop National Front leader Marine le Pen.

She doesn’t vote: “It’s about split personalities – it’s about my life already being complicated enough. I’m splitting into a million pieces with this job I do, and I feel like I live in two countries, so having two nationalities as well feels too much. But I feel flaky not voting, I’m sort of ashamed of it.”

On French president François Hollande’s private life: “Oh, I would really prefer not to know. In France, we are all shocked that the press has been so invasive, because there is a very strong – and I think quite right – belief that a private life should be private. But where I come a cropper is with this ‘first girlfriend’ business. I’m rather old-fashioned. This idea of being first girlfriend,” she says, beginning to laugh, “is just bollocks to me.”

[From The Guardian]

So much ennui! But I kind of love her. I can see why she’s been “typecast” as the gloom-and-doom woman, because it kind of feels like she’s the person in real life. But it’s also interesting because she’s at a point in her life where she’s stopped giving any f—ks about who she’s bad-mouthing and alienating.

Photos courtesy of WENN.