“I didn’t want to do it”: the one role Isabelle Huppert will always regret turning down
Isabelle Huppert is a cinematic legend.
She’s one of the most incredible actors to have never been nominated for an Academy Award, but that perhaps has something to do with the fact that she much prefers to give herself to movies that aren’t exactly primed for mainstream Hollywood success.
Huppert is drawn to dark worlds, once telling The Guardian that her guilty pleasure is “imagining myself as a sadistic and manipulative murderer”. She has played strange women, cold women, and complex, criminal, impassioned, and hilarious women. She’d probably never opt for a classic rom-com role or a part in an action flick, but apart from that, it seems like very little is off the table. She will do whatever it is that she feels compelled to do, even if that means making the decision to embody an incredibly harrowing or perverted character.
While she seems to take on any part she is given with ease, Huppert still knows when certain tasks will be particularly challenging, such that, before she collaborated with Michael Haneke on The Piano Teacher, the Austrian filmmaker actually offered her a role in another one of his movies, but she thought it would be too hard to master.
Haneke, who made his directorial debut with the grim The Seventh Continent, rose to prominence with his 1997 film Funny Games, although it divided opinion, as some critics were blown away by the director’s brutal exploration of violence, with fourth-wall breaks and relentless cruelty, while others thought it was disgusting. I mean, even the pet dog and the young son aren’t safe from the torment of the two tennis-playing young men who show up on the doorstep of the Schober family’s holiday home demanding eggs.
Their apparent trustworthiness, dressed in their tennis whites and seeming familiarity with the neighbours, allows the family to give the pair permission to enter their home, despite being strangers. Soon, they wound Georg, the father, so that he could not move, and things quickly escalated. Haneke’s lens is sharp and unforgiving, although when it was released, he felt as though the audience who needed to see it most, Americans, had missed out, so he remade the film, shot-for-shot, with English-speaking actors, exactly a decade later.
Funny Games is an iconic part of his filmography, and Huppert could’ve played Anna in his 1997 movie, but she turned it down. The part instead went to Susanne Lothar, one of Haneke’s frequent collaborators, who would actually marry her onscreen husband, played by Ulrich Mühe, that same year. Huppert revealed to The Guardian, “I didn’t want to do it. The film was fascinating, but for an actress, it’s just incredibly hard to play. I regretted my decision later because it’s a really great film. But at the time, I just didn’t have the courage to play in it.”
Haneke knew he wasn’t ready to give up on Huppert and wanted her in one of his films. “Later, he offered me a role in The Piano Teacher, partly, I suspect, as a challenge; he said to me, ‘You’ll see, it’s worse than Funny Games!’ I read the script, and I thought it wasn’t worse at all. But the scenario was in English, and perhaps there were some scenes I didn’t really read properly,” she added.
Thus, she agreed to the film, delivering a career-defining and irreplacable turn as a sexually repressed middle-aged woman, but she still regrets not being part of Funny Games, which remains one of cinema’s most brilliant and sharply satirical takes on how we blindly consume violence.
