Politics & Power Quote by Berenice Bejo

Bejo is quietly puncturing a myth audiences love: that period acting is mainly about costumes, props, and dutiful research. Her real subject is absorption. She’s describing a kind of creative tunnel vision where the contemporary world (the missing cell phone, the year stamped on the calendar) isn’t heroically resisted so much as it simply stops mattering because the role is giving her something better: permission to live inside an old movie.

The line about being “so happy” to play a character in the 30s isn’t nostalgia as aesthetic wallpaper; it’s lineage. She’s naming a private canon of actresses from mid-century American cinema that formed her taste “since I was a little girl.” That’s the subtextual engine: she’s not only entering a historical setting, she’s entering a tradition, trying on a silhouette of performance shaped by women who came before her. The decades stack up like a mood board, but also like a pressure: can you carry that kind of screen memory without turning it into imitation?

Her last sentence is the disarming flex: “you don’t really think like that when you prepare.” It reads like modesty, but it’s also a manifesto against over-intellectualizing. She’s asserting that the craft happens in the body and instincts, not in self-conscious commentary about time travel. The intent is practical, almost defensive: don’t mistake the actor’s interior life for a behind-the-scenes featurette. The context, especially for someone known for period work, is a reminder that authenticity isn’t a checklist. It’s an emotional surrender to the rules of a different world.