In France, Léa Seydoux is a very big deal – and, with a major role in the new James Bond film, Spectre, she’s about to become comparably prominent worldwide. In 2013, her fame at home soared when she starred in the lesbian drama Blue Is the Warmest Colour, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. That year, she appeared on the front of so many French magazines that it became a running joke, with one satirical website mocking up a cover of Léa Seydoux Monthly (caption: “The Ubiquity of Léa Seydoux: Léa Seydoux Investigates”). As for her emerging icon status, it was endorsed by no less an authority than Cannes boss Thierry Frémaux, who has called her “Bardot, plus Binoche, plus Kate Moss, and sometimes all three at once.”

With this in mind, I expected a certain grandeur from the 30-year-old star – perhaps that sullen coolness she often exudes on screen. But Seydoux doesn’t stand on ceremony. The venue she chooses for our interview is a no-frills corner cafe in Paris’s southern 14th arrondissement; it’s a miserable day, and I wait inside with the French Spectre publicist, gazing out at torrential rain. Seydoux arrives alone, bang on time; she’s wearing dark trousers and a baggy green and black jumper, which could be either super-expensive or a modest chain-store number, with her hair pinned back. Seemingly without makeup, unless it’s subliminally subtle, her face has that faintly luminous pallor that can make her so intriguingly opaque on screen.

Sitting down to converse in French, she’s reserved but altogether cordial – despite being a little the worse for wear from an autumn cold. Sniffing away, she rubs a finger across her nose, and at one point, draws both hands over her face with fatigue. She also speaks very quietly, as she fixes me directly with pale blue eyes. It may be a well-practised interview technique, but it leaves me craning forward and sometimes cupping one ear to hear her.

The film team review Spectre Guardian

We begin by discussing her curious new film The Lobster – an English-language feature by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, about a world where single people must pair off or else turn into animals. Seydoux gives a glacial, hard-as-nails performance as the leader of a rebel underground, and spends much of the film lurking in a forest, weatherbeaten in a baggy cagoule.

Its outre premise didn’t stop The Lobster attracting major names such as Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz. “We knew what to expect when we read the script,” Seydoux says. “It was just a case of saying what was written, there was no need to work on the characters – that’s not Yorgos’s kind of cinema.” She agreed to appear before even reading The Lobster, having admired Lanthimos’s other absurdist speculations on language and human behaviour, notably Dogtooth. “I like working with directors who have their own universe. For me, cinema’s like a language – everyone has their own form of it.”

Since making her screen debut in 2006, Seydoux has worked with both arcane auteurs and international A-listers – among the latter, Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris), Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds). It works differently each time, she says. “Whether you’re in a blockbuster or an art film, you have to be able to adapt. François Truffaut once said, ‘An actress is like a vase that you put flowers in.’” She laughs, highly amused – whether by the dictum, or the fact that she’s quoting it. “You’re always a sort of vase. However a director wants to do it, I accept.”

When she was offered a Bond film, Seydoux says, “I thought, ‘Right, I really have to go for it – work on my English accent, do some sport, get fit.’” Her work on Spectre, she says, involved “a few stunts, nothing crazy – but still, you have to be up to it.” Director Sam Mendes told her that she needed above all to be “impactful”: “The main role is James Bond, but when she comes on, it’s got to be strong – you have to really notice her.” Her character is called Madeleine Swann – which sounds like an in-joke for lovers of Proust. “Yes,” says Seydoux, “it’s all to do with reminiscence. Spectre is all about Bond’s past coming back to the surface – she’s the madeleine that brings back memories.”

On screen and in many a photoshoot among tousled bedsheets, Seydoux has become identified with a certain archetype of sultry Gallic allure. But she can also play the opposite of glamour: she was a young woman struggling to survive on the outskirts of a ski resort in Swiss feature Sister; a nuclear plant worker in French drama Grand Central; most famously, the punk-haired lesbian artist in Blue Is the Warmest Colour. She has also brought a touch of downbeat realism to two costume dramas by veteran director Benoît Jacquot: Farewell, My Queen, about the drab backstage to Marie Antoinette’s Versailles, and this year’s sober remake of Diary of a Chambermaid, in which she inherited Jeanne Moreau’s apron as a woman navigating the traps of fin de siècle domestic service. Seydoux looks absolutely at home in the past; with that paleness and those sleepy pillows of flesh under her eyes, she resembles the melancholy young women in Manet paintings, heavy with absinthe and ennui.

The Lobster trailer.

Her full name is Léa Hélène Seydoux-Fornier de Clausonne, and her background is indeed as grand as that might suggest. Her father, Henri Seydoux, is the CEO of electronics company Parrot, known for its Bluetooth, satnav and drones. Her mother, Valérie Schlumberger, was a costume designer, novelist and actor (she appeared in Maurice Pialat’s 1983 classic À nos amours), before founding an eco-crafts company based in Senegal. The Seydoux family, Léa says, was cultured, “but a bit chaotic. There weren’t really frameworks or rules. It was very bohemian.” She was the youngest of seven children – some from previous relationships of her parents, who separated when she was three. Other family members have been grandees in French film companies Pathé and Gaumont, but Seydoux has always been adamant that she never had, nor asked for, any help getting ahead in acting.

With men, there’s always that element of seduction. Male directors always project their own desire of women Léa Seydoux

When I ask which actors have impressed her, the first name she mentions isn’t one of the A-listers she’s known. “An actress who really fascinates me is Adèle [Exarchopoulos, her co-star in Blue Is…]. When I worked with her, she was like a tornado. Every time was just… wow! That’s real performing. And Tom Cruise,” she adds. “He has this very, very serious thing going on” – she puts on a hyper-intense Cruise-style glare – “really fascinating.”

She loves working in the US, and in the English language. American and British actors have a sense of fun, she says: “In France, it’s a lot more austere.” Has she ever felt stereotyped as an all-purpose “femme francaise” for international audiences? “No. As an actor, it’s up to you to show that you can do something else. For me, the interesting actors don’t always go where you expect to find them. In France, actors are always the same. Gérard Depardieu is a very good actor, but he always plays Gérard Depardieu. If I were asked to play Léa Seydoux, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do.”

Among the directors Seydoux has worked with are a handful of women, including some very individual Europeans: Ursula Meier from Switzerland, Austria’s Jessica Hausner, and in France, Catherine Breillat. When you work with women, Seydoux says, “it’s a much more equal relationship, you’re on the same terrain. With men, there’s always that element of seduction. Male directors always project their own desire of women – how they want a woman to dress, to do her hair. With a woman director, it’s more a projection of herself. But if I made a film,” she adds, “I’d certainly cast a man I liked the look of. It’s all about erotic projection.”

Blue Is the Warmest Colour trailer.

There’s one male director with whom Seydoux had a thorny experience – Abdellatif Kechiche, on Blue Is the Warmest Colour. This tale of an intense romance between two young women contains Seydoux’s most bravura performance, the film pushing her and Adèle Exarchopolous to the limit, both in the sex scenes and in the even more intense tear-filled confrontations. Despite the film’s widespread acclaim, many viewers felt that Blue was ultimately a male fantasy. “Without a doubt, yes, I think it was,” says Seydoux. “It’s bound to be if a man makes a film about two women. But it’s a film that has its own truth, its own power.”

Notoriously, Blue Is… was a gruelling experience for its leads, involving as many as 100 takes for some scenes, and reputedly cantankerous behaviour from its director. Seydoux called the experience “horrible” and said she would never work with Kechiche again; he responded furiously in print. “He’s not someone I detest,” Seydoux shrugs. “I sometimes dream about him – but I’m not mad at him. As for the controversy, it happened, but I don’t regret what I said. What remains is the film.”

Seydoux’s surge in fame doesn’t seem to have caused her too many problems; in France, she points out, people are discreet about celebrity. Visibility is not something that she pursues. “Maybe if I did, if I dressed or did my hair a certain way, or wore high heels in the street… But I don’t make celebrity happen – it would overtake my acting, and that would worry me.” Her boyfriend, she says, is not in the public eye; she has never named him in the press, but has stated that it’s a serious relationship and that he’s “good at philosophy”.

Critics and film-makers sometimes ascribe an enigmatic, sphinx-like quality to Seydoux. But that may be just her ability to hide her own identity, folding her self into a wide range of roles. French film-maker Rebecca Zlotowski, who has directed her in two features, later tells me, “I don’t think Léa is hiding anything. Certain actors don’t have a secret, but they do have a mystery – there’s a big difference.” Zlotowski also sees Seydoux as one of those actors who can use sexuality in a genuinely interesting way. “Even if they’re required to be very sexy, they go beyond the cliches – they make things more complex. Léa has a real voluptuousness.”

As for the image of the red-carpet siren that she has worked so confidently, “It’s a disguise,” says Seydoux. “I put it on when it’s time to do press,” she says – and flashes me a huge fake PR grin. “But that’s not what I am. Nothing’s really changed. I have to still be the child I once was, otherwise I couldn’t act. And to be a child, I have to be a bit transparent. I have to disappear.”

The Lobster is released on Friday 16 October; Spectre on 26 October