acting for Michel Gondry

How did being recognised for your role in Dancer In The Dark affect you ? Was it pleasing to be approved by a group of people unrelated to what is, essentially, your day job ? I read that you turned down a role in Michel Gondry’s The Science Of Sleep – was this in order to focus solely on music for the time being, on Volta and all the promo activity around it, or are you finished with acting ?

That is some sort of misunderstanding. There was, in the beginning, a chance I would play the main role in Human Nature, Michel’s first film (released in 2001). Parts of it were related to me – I had been going on about it for years with my visual collaborators, if i could be all hairy, and the whole Isobel story : being born in nature and not fitting at all into urban situations. But it was important for Michel to claim his independence at that time and I fully understood, so we both thought it would be good that he would do something without me. At that point we had done six videos together, but I was really relieved because it would have been hard to turn a friend down. It really isn’t on the top of my list to act – it is kinda at the bottom.

www.drownedinsound.com, April 24 2007