19-year old ingénue Lou Roy-Lecollinet‘s Golden Days
The Parisian actress talks on-screen nudity in her cinematic debut.
“It was very hard being naked in front of everybody,” she says about the nude moments in the film. “But it was easier than other, very emotional scenes—I felt more exposed in those.”
When she was cast in Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days (out in March), Lou Roy-Lecollinet may have lost a friend, but she found an occupation. “I didn’t want to be an actress. I wanted to direct plays onstage,” says the 19-year-old Parisian, who accompanied a high-school drama-class pal to an open call for moral support and happened to catch the eye of the renowned French director. Despite having no interest in being in front of the camera, she landed the part. “It wasn’t my first idea for a future career, but now I’m thinking about cinema.”
Her innate talent clearly helped, too. Roy-Lecollinet effortlessly manages to portray both Esther’s hyper self-possession and her crippling loneliness: Initially an aloof presence, Esther slowly reveals the chinks in her psychological armor. And, like her character, Roy-Lecollinet discovered a few new things about herself.
“It was very hard being naked in front of everybody,” she says about the nude moments in the film. “But it was easier than other, very emotional scenes—I felt more exposed in those.”
Lou Roy-Lecollinet
Lou Roy-Lecollinet is an actress, known for My Golden Days (2015) and Rencontres de cinéma (2007).