Léa Seydoux on 'Gentle Monster' at Telluride: "I Like When Acting's a Bit Dangerous"
Léa Seydoux says she gravitates toward roles that carry real risk. "I like when acting's a bit dangerous, I think I like to take risks," the French actor told Deadline's Breaking Baz column at the Telluride Film Festival on 6 September 2026.
The film she brought to the Colorado mountains is Gentle Monster, written and directed by Austrian film-maker Marie Kreutzer. Seydoux plays Lucy, a musician whose director husband Philip, played by Laurence Rupp, is arrested for involvement in online child pornography groups. Catherine Deneuve co-stars as Eloise. The film runs one hour and 54 minutes and was shot on 35mm and 16mm stock, processed at the Berlin lab Andec (Deadline; Instagram).
Seydoux told Deadline she has come to appreciate difficulty in material. "I understand things in their complexity more than before," she said, calling the Gentle Monster script "full of complexity." The mother of two sons, aged nine and 21 months, Seydoux did not draw an explicit line between parenthood and the role, but the part of Lucy demands an actor sit with a particular kind of fallout: a woman whose life has been built around a man whose darkest side she never saw (Deadline; Hollywood Reporter).
Gentle Monster premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2026, where it received a six-minute standing ovation (Hollywood Reporter). Deadline's review from the festival called Seydoux's performance "very committed, unaffected" (Deadline). It was one of two Seydoux films at Cannes this year, alongside The Unknown (IndieWire).
Netflix acquired the film during the Cannes market. A Deadline report in May cited a source saying that if the streamer landed Gentle Monster, pairing it with La Bola Negra would mean Netflix was "playing their Oscar game" (Deadline). The Telluride screening, coming three months after Cannes, keeps the film in the awards conversation — the festival is a regular early stop for titles aiming at year-end prizes.
For Kreutzer, whose previous film Corsage reimagined Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Gentle Monster is another study of a woman navigating the gap between public life and private truth. For Seydoux, it is a role that asked her to work without a safety net. She told Deadline she discussed shooting nude scenes for the film in a video interview at Cannes (Deadline).
The Telluride selection was announced on 3 September by mk2 Films, the film's international sales agent, confirming the festival berth (Facebook). What remains is the wider release: a Netflix date has not been publicly set.
