The day I’m interviewing French Jennifer Lawrence, she is having a simpler day than actual Jennifer Lawrence. Today, actual Jennifer Lawrence has woken up to another day of people loudly, publicly debating whether they should look at stolen naked pictures of her that have been made available on the internet. French Jennifer Lawrence, on the other hand, woke up, put on a sweater, and came to work at Dubbing Brothers, where she assumes the French-speaking voice of almost every J-Law role that comes through France’s large and spectacularly meticulous dubbing industry.

Her name is Kelly Marot. No one in France could pick her out of a lineup, and, at the moment, I’m the only journalist on Earth who cares what she’s doing — which is consuming a pastry tart roughly equal in size to her face. Today she’s dubbing scenes with French Daniel Radcliffe (né Kelyan Blanc), a kid with a patchy beard in jeans and an unmemorable T-shirt who’s been voicing Harry Potter since The Sorcerer’s Stone. With their talented, consistent representation of English-speaking stars, Marot and Blanc are crucial to bringing Hollywood films to Francophone audiences.

“If we replaced him,” one of France’s most legendary dubbing directors says, gesturing in Blanc’s direction, “it would be a big scandal. A big scandal.”

NOT the French Daniel Radcliffe.

In France, birthplace of cinema, bastion of taste and art and cultural superiority, 40 percent of the programming on TV is American films and shows. As a result, the country was recently a target for Netflix, which furthered its plot for global domination by launching there in September. Meanwhile, in French movie theaters—the French being the fifth-highest consumers of cinema in the world — 50 percent of tickets are for features made in the U.S. And nearly all of it gets dubbed.

Many of the hottest releases come through Dubbing Brothers. Its offices, located on an industrial edge of Paris where the traffic is lighter and the buildings take on a postmodern charmlessness, are secured with solid iron gates. Behind them, the company courtyard contains many, many, many employees smoking cigarettes. Inside, a long hallway is dotted with doors to numbered rooms. A computerized schedule hangs over the receptionist’s head, giving the locations for the day’s dozen or so projects. The Drop, starring Tom Hardy. Daniel Radcliffe’s new film, Horns. An episode from the most recent season of Revenge. A Season 9 episode of Criminal Minds.

Behind those numbered doors, what happens is not your father’s Bruce-Lee–movie dubbing. This, as long as the voiceover actors — and writers, translators, transcribers, sound engineers, directors, and everyone else involved in this process — are given the time and money to make it, is Art.

“You’re projecting out!” a director hollers in one of this morning’s recording sessions. Each studio inside Dubbing Brothers is large and dark, with a giant cinema screen but no chairs. It’s like a movie theater with the seats taken out. Toward the back, an engineer sits behind a long soundboard. Next to him stands a director, and in front of them, a waist-high bar. In this particular studio, there’s an actor leaning against it. He has some microphones in front of him. A moment ago, when everyone was ready, the engineer pushed a button, a scene played with no sound, and the actor started yelling his lines — at the drop of a hat, started yelling so hard that the bar was shaking. But then the director stopped him because he was projecting out.

“Like a French person,” the director explains further. “Americans contain their energy, even when it’s a lot. It’s concentrated internally.”

The actor is nodding, like, Ah, yeah, of course.

“Your energy is good,” the director says, retreating behind the soundboard again. “But make it more American.”

The director already stopped him once before, because there needed to be more emphasis on the word hate in this sentence he’s yelling.

On the next take, he is stopped again because he messes up his lines. He throws his head back, laughing, frustrated.

This is how they do it: just seconds of footage at a time. Everyone in the room watches a few lines of English dialogue with a rolling French script at the bottom of it. The engineer presses stop. For movies, the actors have generally never seen the scene before, and sometimes, they can’t even see it now — Hollywood is terrified of films getting leaked on the internet, so when Dubbing Brothers received each Lord of the Rings movie, the studio had blacked out the entire screen except for little boxes around the actors’ mouths, and even those closed when the actors weren’t talking. So everyone watches — or doesn’t watch — the scene, maybe twice. The engineer presses rewind. And it’s time to record the voice-over.

The scene plays again, without sound, and the actor recites the translated script. The director gives notes. They go back and do it again. The French-language script rolling along the bottom comes courtesy of custom-built, proprietary software that displays, as well as the words, symbols that denote the perfect timing of voice-related actions in the movie. There’s a symbol to audibly inhale. A symbol to exhale. A symbol for kissing noises, which the actors must make with their mouths on their hands.

They record, then play back what they’ve just done. Once in French. Once again with the French and English laid over each other. Perhaps a couple more times each way, as needed by the director to watch and listen for necessary adjustments.

Sylvester Stallone en français.

His tone needs to go down, to be more definitive.

Okay, the actor says. He says he’ll put it more in his belly.

Blow up inside, the director says. Like an American.

When they do it again, the actor is yelling so loud, but containing so much, that his body is visibly vibrating. But then it’s difficult for him to maintain that intensity all the way to the end of the sentence. The script software also has a typeset-tracking function that the writers can use to indicate if the actor needs to talk fast, and it seems like he always does. The term “bachelor party,” for instance, is just two words in English, but in French it’s an entire expression that translates to “a funeral for a young boy’s life,” and the actor of today’s scene cannot get through all the words in the heavily tracked, smushed-together script lines with all the American rage he’s not projecting but containing without running out of breath and fervor.

They stop, to talk about alternative phrasing.

They cut three words from the script.

They do it again.

They do it again.

“Bon,” the director says. And after 10 minutes, they’ve got themselves about five sentences of top-quality dubbing.

Mom and daughter working it out.

Danielle Perret, the director who called Blanc indispensable, invites me into her office, which has framed movie posters all over the walls. She did Seven. She did Reservoir Dogs. Austin Powers, The Hunger Games, The Expendables, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Wolf of Wall Street. She was a theater director and film editor first, many decades ago, but she loves dubbing and loves when it’s done well. She is 76 years old and she could retire, but won’t. She is tiny, wearing a blue patterned dress and her hair long and dyed black, and she works with the best voice-over talent France has to offer.

“She is an actress,” Perret says of Marot, the French Jennifer Lawrence.

Because this is Art, French dubbing cultivates personae. Every time Tom Cruise opens his mouth, the same voice should come out, so that the audience can experience the same sense of intimacy and attachment that the original-language audience does with the real Tom Cruise. Sometimes changes do happen: A decade or so ago, French Tom Cruise was replaced because he smoked too much and his voice was getting too smoky. But French audiences noticed the switch, and were not pleased.

Kelly Marot’s breakout dubbing role was as Rachel in Glee. That got her the chance to audition for the role of Katniss in The Hunger Games, which landed her in every voice-over actor’s dream position: the designated voice of a huge American star.

If all goes well for Marot, a 28-year-old mom, she will have steady work for as long as Jennifer Lawrence does.

Marot is so in demand that she works every day. She does multiple actresses, lead roles on TV shows, the French audiobooks of The Hunger Games, parts in video games, cartoons. Plus she is still Rachel in Glee, and plays Sansa in Game of Thrones. Perret points to the quality of Marot’s voice — it has just the right touch of raspy to it — and of course her talent.

When she was younger, Marot did on-screen work, including a good part on a French TV show. But nine years ago, she had a kid, and then she didn’t have time for what the entertainment industry demanded. Agents. Casting calls. Publicity. Hair and makeup and wardrobe. Now, when French media call for interviews after each big J-Law film is released, Marot declines. “I wouldn’t know what to say,” she says. But the lack of exposure has no negative impact on her career. She makes good money, she has a private life, she has split ends — and that’s fine.

Let’s face it: It’s a mean, exploitative, fickle, and resentful world out there in the spotlight. And not everyone has the time, or the looks — or the stomach — for that. Le doublage is Marot’s refuge. For other actors, too, it provides opportunities in their medium that might not otherwise be available or palatable to them.

“My skin was never right,” Nathalie Karsenti, the French January Jones, tells me at her apartment, a third-floor walkup in Paris’s best gayborhood, Le Marais. She is short and not waif-thin and lovely, mid-40s with shoulder-length brown hair and an enviable olive kiss to her skin tone.

Or enviable to me, I guess: After graduating from one of France’s top drama schools, Karsenti was told in auditions that she was too dark to look properly French — but that she wasn’t dark enough to play an Arab.

“My physical characteristics closed doors for me,” she says, sitting at her kitchen table, “even if I had the talent to do it.” It does seem that her acting chops weren’t the problem. She is not just January Jones: She’s also been French Keira Knightley, French Eva Mendes, and French Zoe Saldana.

“I loved it,” Karsenti says of the first time she tried dubbing. “I didn’t have to take care of the color of my skin anymore; I could just work. It’s better, what I do, than being a star, as a woman and as a mom.”