The strangest thing about watching Napoleon, particularly the scenes between the eponymous French emperor and his first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, is that you quickly realize you’re watching a very dark comedy. That’s in part a credit to director Ridley Scott, who brings an absurdist sensibility to the bizarre power dynamics between one of history’s most notorious war commanders and his mercurial empress. But the tone is ultimately sold by the chaotic, boiling chemistry between their portrayers, Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby.
A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races
Kirby especially goes in directions you don’t expect. Her performance is impossible to pin down, a marvel of emotional contradictions and compelling resoluteness. In her unyielding stare and poise, it’s easy to understand how she’s slowly driving the world’s most powerful man completely mad. And in the relationship’s more intense, painful, and even traumatic moments, Kirby imbues Joséphine with a subtle empathy, a lifetime of experiences registering across a nervous flicker in the eye.
With Napoleon in theaters this Thanksgiving weekend, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated Kirby (Pieces of a Woman, The Crown) joined Little Gold Men for an in-depth conversation about building the most enigmatic character of her screen career. Read on or listen below.
Vanity Fair: There’s a fascinating power differential between Napoleon and Joséphine. When you go into a movie called Napoleon, about Napoleon, you’re expecting this epic portrait of this brutal war general, and instead, in your scenes, you get this portrait of this really resolute woman and this very insecure, at times very strange man. How did you approach it?
Vanessa Kirby: We both felt it was one of the most fascinating, contradictory, and complex relationships we’d ever come across. [Laughs] I urge anyone to go in and explore it more. His letters, for example, even as a starting point—it’s unbelievable that you have this, as you say, military general who’s out there on the battlefield, instigating war and conquering land, and then rushing back to his tent to write these letters, which almost feel adolescent in their obsessive-compulsive nature. He wrote to her nearly every day, and she didn’t write him back in the early days at all.
Looking at their decades-long relationship—how dependent they were on each other; codependent, really—we felt the power shifts within it, the need to possess, [less] a maturing and more a fusing with each other and a need. In any relationship where there’s extreme need and there’s something unhealed in them as individuals when they come together, there’s inevitably going to be something that’s naturally volatile.
You’ve talked about the openness you had with Joaquin to let loose and go off from what was on the script. I believe the slap in the movie, for instance, was improvised. How did that dynamic between you as actors develop?
When you go on a journey that you know is going to involve painful things in a psyche to explore, it always reminds me of when you go do a play, and you go do something like A Streetcar Named Desire. By the end of the play, Blanche, as your sister, has been committed to a mental asylum and has slept with your husband, if you were playing Stella. Ben Foster and Gillian Anderson and I did that show in London and in New York, and I remember us having a togetherness in exploring something that’s searingly painful. That togetherness really helps when you’re going to those places. I felt it in a movie that Shia LaBeouf and I did, Pieces of a Woman; we also had that. It’s a sense of knowing that you’re there for each other despite the realms that you have to go to that are uncomfortable and really unpleasant and sometimes very tough.
Is there anything you remember on your end, bringing something into those scenes that came up in the filming of them?
There was a sequence of scenes all set over one night after he throws her out and finds out that she’s had an affair. Our editor just reminded me, “Some of those takes on the sofa were nine minutes long.” I said to her, “Really?” I couldn’t remember what we did, and she said, “Oh, you guys did everything.” She had to find a 20-second scene between them within the parameters of everything that we had shot. I think I screamed in his face. There were lots of tears. Yeah. [Laughs] The relationship never felt like one you could draw on a graph. It fluctuated so much, where he was absolutely obsessed with her and she wasn’t sure about him…so each scene could be played in different ways depending on where they’re at exactly in that moment, both individually and together. We tried to play things in as many different ways as possible, in case there was a journey there that we hadn’t missed out on by the time we came to the end.
