‘Some people are afraid of women in power’: How Marion Cotillard found hers at 50

As Celine Dumont in season four of media drama Morning Wars, Marion Cotillard cuts a fine figure in the boardroom of an American television news network. As the company endures the aftershocks of a merger, she slices her way through the narrative, manipulating her allies and kneecapping her enemies.

“Some people are afraid of women in power, and some people are afraid of women in general,” says Cotillard when we sit down to talk about the state of play in the world’s most compelling media soap opera.

“I think women are very powerful, and I’m not talking about powerful in a way of having power in the media, or in politics, or socially. I think we are very powerful inside, and sometimes it can be scary, but why? I think when you [fear] a woman, it’s because you are afraid of the impact that she would have on you.”

In many ways, Morning Wars is itself an expression of female power. The show’s two leads are Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, who also serve as executive producers. Kerry Ehrin developed the series and served as showrunner for the first two seasons, and its current producer/showrunner is Charlotte Stoudt.

“One of the greatest powers that a woman has, and I could see that in the show, is to create a world where women are powerful not by getting more power than men, but by creating a world where there is a harmony, and where the power is in the women, and in the men as well,” Cotillard says.

“When you empower a woman, she doesn’t want to [step over] men, she just wants to be recognised. She wants to create more with men, together, as a unified team. And that’s what I saw on this show. I saw powerful women, and I saw powerful men, and sharing this energy together was one of the most beautiful things.”

In many ways, this world of women in power harks back to the 1980s, a decade in which Dynasty clawed its way to the top of the power-soap heap, and shoulder pad-enhanced female titans like Alexis Carrington-Colby (Joan Collins) were propelled into the centre of the global conversation. For good measure, I throw one of Alexis’ great lines at Marion: when she said her ex-husband, oil tycoon Blake Carrington, was driven by a sense of “it couldn’t be done, but I did it”.

“That’s totally the ambition [that drives Celine],” says Cotillard. “Because Celine wants to reach that point where she will not have to prove herself any more. She wants to achieve more than what is asked of her. These things, on paper, are impossible, and she wants to prove that it’s possible so she does not have to prove herself any more.” (“By the way, I love Dynasty,” she adds with a smile.)

Cotillard is playing a character with a complex family history in media series Morning Wars, opposite Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Greta Lee.Credit: Rory Payne/Trunk Archive/Snapper

Celine enters the fray as a kind of disruptor, but in the ecosystem of her own family’s dynasty she also knows what it feels like to be powerless and cornered. There is great bravado, but there is an interior world that is fraught with uncertainty, not least because the network’s news chief, Stella Bak (Greta Lee), is sleeping with Celine’s husband, Miles Allam (Aaron Pierre).

“She has a lot of power, but she has a lot to prove,” Cotillard says. “There are a lot of expectations on her shoulders. She’s not totally free to do whatever she wants. She has to tick boxes; therefore she struggles inside. She cannot be totally true to herself. She cannot follow her instincts.

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“What is interesting is that she’s kind of fascinated by [Jennifer Aniston’s character] Alex, who has a lot of power as well. Maybe not as much power as Celine, but she has something very powerful, and that is that she’s free. She has the freedom to be herself, to express herself the way she wants. And that she seeks the truth is liberating.”

Fifty-year-old Cotillard is an unusual choice for a mainstream American television drama, a French actor who has appeared in both European and Hollywood productions, with an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and two French César awards on her shelf. Her acting credits range from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement to Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en Rose, in which she played Édith Piaf.

Showrunner Stoudt had described Cotillard as a “super fan” of Morning Wars which, I suggest, can be a risky thing for an actor to take on – to go from being a fan to taking a job inside the magic mystery box, so to speak. Cotillard agrees there were risks in accepting the part.

“I was like, ‘Oh, but I was such a happy viewer, and now I’m going to know everything. Will I enjoy watching it while I’m in it?’ I thought that I would read the whole thing. I didn’t know that I wouldn’t have all the scripts. So I got to experience the excitement I had as a viewer, waiting for the next script to come.”

Working within the mystery was an unexpected challenge, she says, because as a society we’re obsessed with knowing things. So I ask Cotillard whether there is more power in leaving the mysteries where they are and only dealing with them when they are revealed.

Cotillard as Celine Dumont in the latest season of Morning Wars.

“There are many ways I could answer, because it’s like a question with drawers,” she says. “I’m used to feature films. When I do a movie, I have the whole script and I know where the story and the character end. And then I play with my imagination to create the world that is not in the script.

“Here, I had four scripts when I started and I didn’t know where my character would go,” she says. “Billy Crudup [who plays Celine’s subordinate, Cory Ellison] helped me with this because he said, ‘I know the kind of actor you are. You’re like me, we want to prepare.’ And he said, ‘Just trust them because you will not have all the information until the end.’ So I was a bit anxious, but at the same time I thought it was super exciting.”

There are also cultural differences between French cinema and the way America makes television and movies. The French eye loves subtlety and interior emotion, and characters are often played in a series of small, delicate notes. American television is more machine-like, faster and dialogue-heavy.

Cotillard is unsure if her experience on the show backs up this assessment. “I always have a hard time comparing the art forms, whether it’s a film or a TV show, based on where it’s from. There are also subtle, detail-oriented pieces of art in America that are so deep and so intense, as in France. It depends on the writers and the directors. We have also shitty things in France, and [America] also has masterpieces.”

Cotillard, born in the mid-1970s in Paris, is something of a cinematic chameleon. As Mal Cobb in Inception she was a silhouette on screen, styled with a severe chignon. And as Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose she was transformed wholly, shaving her hairline and pushing through a brutal physical reinvention in pursuit of the character. The effect was so devastating it won her an Academy Award.

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In Morning Wars Celine is, like many television characters, clipped from both a well-established playbook and from Cotillard’s own life. The speed of production in television often means a story depends on actors re-drawing themselves largely to fill the brief. And in that sense, Cotillard finds herself playing a character who, at first glance at least, is like her.

“One of the hardest things for me is that you do a movie and then a year later you see the result and you have no power over it,” she says. “When you are an actor, you see yourself like no one will ever see themselves. On the screen there are so many details and subtleties and the camera comes so close. This is something that pushes me to accept myself more, but sometimes it’s super-scary, I have to be honest.”

As Celine, the reflected image might look too much like herself for Cotillard to remain objective. “It’s the hardest thing for me – I don’t think it’s really the image at that point,” she says. “It’s like, does this work? Does what I had inside, what I felt inside, read as I wanted it to? It took me a long time, and a long way, to accept myself. And I’m still not there and I don’t know if I will ever be.”

Morning Wars is streaming on Apple TV+ now.