Talking with some friends outside Facets Multimedia on the 1500 block of West Fullerton Avenue on a steamy summer evening, you spot a casually dressed young woman about to enter the theater and you hear someone pronounce her name as “Ee-REN.”
You’ve heard that pronunciation only once before and, upon doing a double-take, realize that the woman is indeed Irene Jacob, the soulful Swiss-French star of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “The Double Life of Veronique” and “Three Colors: Red,” two of the most evocative, thought-provoking European films of recent years.
The incongruity of seeing this art-house icon waltz solo into the theater that last year mounted an impressive Kieslowski retrospective is matched only by hearing why she’s in town: to play Wesley Snipes’ girlfriend and a Starbucks worker in “U.S. Marshals,” the sequel to “The Fugitive.”
Talk about culture shock: For the first time Jacob finds herself working for an extended period in an American city to play a supporting role in a Hollywood thriller.
“I’ve never worked with such a big production,” the 31-year-old actress said over a dinner salad in Old Town. “It’s just a different concept. It’s like comparing a European town to a town with high-rises. People move differently, and they organize themselves and meet differently. So I really found it interesting to find my place and to adapt in such circumstances, which I finally did.”
Jacob (pronounced “zha-KOHB”) arrived here in late May, returned home to Paris in late July while the rest of the production moved to Kentucky and Tennessee, and is due back in Chicago this week for another few days of filming. She does have some prior Chicago-area experience, having lived in Glen Ellyn for a year when she was 5 and her father, a physicist, was working at Fermilab. (Her parents now live in Geneva, Switzerland, where she grew up.)
A luminous actress with an engaging, down-to-earth quality offscreen, Jacob balances the cerebral and intuitive. She likes to use her head but projects an empathy that comes straight from the heart. Unlike many actors, she speaks of her career less as a series of strategic moves than as an accumulation of character-building explorations.
So her time in Chicago became a chance to immerse herself in the city’s culture plus the world of big-bucks Hollywood filmmaking.
“I thought I should see how a woman who would have lived here would speak, what idioms she would use,” Jacob said. “I should go to the Starbucks cafe. I should do this. I should do that. I have so many things to do because I wanted to get enough information.”
Here’s some of how Jacob spent her summer non-vacation on location:
– She went to the Art Institute of Chicago “many times.”
– She explored the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Science and Industry and the Chicago Cultural Center.
– During a free week, she took jazz singing lessons in the mornings and lessons to refine her English-speaking accent in the afternoon.
– “I did the Loop tour, which is a very good tour.”
– She saw “A Streetcar Named Desire” at Steppenwolf, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at the Goodman and a Second City revue.
– She went on a moviegoing spree, attending seven films in Facets’ Francesco Rosi retrospective, “Jerry Maguire” at Brew & View at the Vic (“I thought it was a great atmosphere to see a film”), “Adam’s Rib” at a Music Box matinee, a restored print of Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” at the University of Chicago’s Doc Films, a critics’ screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” and such new releases as “Men in Black” (a private screening hosted by Tommy Lee Jones, star of that movie and “U.S. Marshals”), “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “Ulee’s Gold,” “Speed 2: Cruise Control” and “Face/Off” (she walked out — too gruesome).
Her verdict on the Chicago experience: “great.”
“There’s a kindness that happily surprised me,” she said, recalling a time she was in Starbucks and couldn’t decide what kind of cup to buy. “The guy said, `Take the cup and if you don’t like it, bring it back.’ I thought that was so funny. People in France would never say that. How could you not decide on a cup?”
The thrill of the new
It’s clear, meanwhile, that her probing nature is as much a way of life as a work method. “I think it’s important in this profession — as in many other professions — to be curious, to be genuinely curious of other people, to other people’s ideas, other people’s points of view, other people’s teaching if it’s like a lesson or knowledge, and to try to benefit from them, to know that you can participate in their knowledge,” she said. “By this you’re building your own knowledge that other people will also participate in.”
Jacob, who recalls having wanted to act ever since she imitated family members at parties as a child, left Geneva when she was 18 — “It’s not a town for young people” — and attended drama school in Paris. There, director Louis Malle cast her as a piano teacher in 1987’s “Au Revoir Les Enfants,” which led to her famous collaborations with the late Kieslowski: “Veronique” (1991) and “Red” (1994).
Her highest profile English-language movie has been 1995’s “Othello,” in which she bravely played Desdemona despite the difficulty of performing Shakespeare as a non-native English speaker. “Today I would feel more prepared for it, but I was very happy about the experience,” she said.
Her mixed bag of other movies, most of which have yet to receive United States distribution, include an independent American comedy called “Trusting Beatrice,” the English-language European flop “All Men Are Mortal,” an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel “Victory,” and “Beyond the Clouds,” a series of interconnected short films co-directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders.
“Incognito,” a caper film about forgery that she shot in England with actor Jason Patric and director John Badham, has been repeatedly bumped by Warner Bros. and now is scheduled for release early next year.
As for “U.S. Marshals,” directed by Stuart Baird (“Executive Decision”) and due out next spring, Jacob said she signed on because “The Fugitive” was a smart, relatively non-violent chase film, and the new movie “would allow me to experience something different.”
As she describes it, her character spends a lot of time on the phone trying to help Snipes’ fugitive, though she does wind up in a car chase. The role calls for a different approach than the introspection she brought to various European films.
“Other qualities are required,” she said, “and it’s interesting to try to find them.”
She had to get used to acting amid an abundance of machinery, including distracting video monitors. She also observed Jones and Snipes to get a better feel for the rhythm of acting in short, plot-propelling takes.
Actor Tom Wood, who reprises his “Fugitive” role as a key member of Jones’ law-enforcement team, looked to Jacob as well. “She’s a terrific actress; she’s a beautiful woman and very centering,” he said. “I’m a big fan of her work, and I remember saying to myself, `Look, today is your opportunity to work opposite Irene Jacob, and you’d better enjoy that because it may never happen again.’ And that’s what I did.”
After she finishes “U.S. Marshals,” she’ll return to Paris to film a comedy called “American Cuisine” co-starring Jason Lee (“Chasing Amy”). She also spends a fair amount of time in London, where her boyfriend lives.
Her grand plan, meanwhile, simply involves “finding new encounters.”
“As long as you think you don’t know something, you’re alive, and you’re curious and you’re creative,” Jacob said, eyes twinkling. “Yes, it’s a constant learning process which will never end, and we’ll die with a mystery in front of us.”
