T Magazine: Tagging Buildings With a Rising Actress
For Charlotte Le Bon, the only thing better than a good role is an empty alley on a quiet night.
Photographed by Adrian Crispin
Just after midnight in Paris on a cool evening in June, Charlotte Le Bon is packed into a small car with four friends, on the lookout for a wall to tag. Dressed in high-waisted jeans and a cropped sweatshirt, the 29-year-old French Canadian actress is holding a rolled-up print of one of her recent drawings and a vat of glue mixed earlier in the day at a friend’s apartment. “You know that feeling when you walk into a house and you immediately want to buy it?” she asks as we wind through the arrondissements of Paris. “That’s what I’m looking for.”
Born in Montreal to actor parents, Le Bon spent seven years as a model before being cast as a comedic weather girl on a French talk show. With her gamine looks and anime eyes, Le Bon introduced herself to Hollywood as what she calls “the joyful, pretty girlfriend” in films by directors such as Lasse Hallstrom and Robert Zemeckis, but it was the nonchalant fizz she brought to the biopic “Yves Saint Laurent,” as the designer’s muse Victoire Doutreleau, that caught people’s attention. Le Bon, who shot five movies in the past year, is determined to escape the role of ingénue with performances as a love interest to Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale in the World War I drama “The Promise” and as an accomplice to an assassination opposite Jamie Dornan in the Nazi spy thriller “Anthropoid.”
So why the late-night wilding? “It’s easy to be insecure when you’re doing this job,” says Le Bon, who, while enjoying her moment of success, also knows how fleeting it can be. “That’s why I need to draw, because it feeds my soul and makes me feel good. This is something I will own all my life.”
Working out of Idem Paris, a 15,000-square-foot printing studio that has housed countless artists — from Picasso, Raymond Pettibon, Matisse and Miró to David Lynch and Daido Moriyama — Le Bon has been preparing for her first solo exhibition at Galerie Cinema (which opened this month). Although the show features all manner of adorable beasts, each piece, says Le Bon, is linked by a feeling. “My characters are always alone,” she says. “So there’s something melancholic about them, but there is a little bit of hope. It’s about poetic isolation.”
By 3:30 in the morning, the crew has settled on a wall in the 20th Arrondissement. They work quickly and quietly, pasting the art while scanning the street for police. While much of the street art in Paris has a political message, Le Bon’s subtle interventions come from a more intimate place, such as when she pasted a peace sign embroidered with flowers in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. On her website and her Instagram, she posts whimsical, finely detailed images of men with their heads replaced by flowers and anthropomorphic creatures that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Maurice Sendak story. “Art should be for everybody,” she says. “I like when it’s not difficult to understand.” After 15 minutes, her piece has been fastened to the wall. She pushes her bangs off her face and stands back to contemplate what she’s added to the neighborhood: two hands painted red and intertwined to form a human heart.
