IMMORTAL TO MYSELF

Paris, October 2023

AMIRA CASAR, the multi-hyphenate creative notably recognised for her acting, has played a wide array of roles ranging from army officers, lesbian gallerists and artists, to photographers like Dora Maar, terrorists, nuns, lawyers, and Medea and Hedda Gabler. “I do love it when directors imagine me in different shapes and forms,” she says. However, the limelight was never a priority. Instead, Casar’s focus has been to acquire and develop the necessary depth and technique to excel in taking on roles that explore and question the realms of the familiar and the unfamiliar, which she finds most stimulating.

As a multilingual performer, she has never felt caged in by a particular language, culture or art form, and she calls herself a “European” performer. Growing up in a diverse environment has granted her an affection for musicality, accents and voices, something she explores throughout her career by collaborating in all artistic mediums. “Working with musicians gives me a floating sensation. Voices like Mina, Lotte Lenya and Kathleen Ferrier were very sacred to me as a child,” tells us Casar. Most recently, she voiced monologues about deception, treachery, death, war and misery for The Indian Queen at the Salzburg Festival, concurring with her love for immersive collaborations with musicians through opera and theatre. In 2019, Casar had already explored the role of narrator/récitante in Médée by Cherubini at the Salzburg Festival, with the legendary Wiener Philharmoniker and directed by Simon Stone. With Stone, she also played Olga in Tchekov’s The Three Sisters in 2017 at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, a role which she will be performing once again in January 2024 at the Warsaw Opera.

Left Coat **Junya Watanabe**
Right Dress **Loewe**

Amira, tell us about your background.
In my years studying drama, at the Conservatoire Nationale d’Art Dramatique, I was mostly concerned with excelling in my future profession whilst fulfilling my dreams of working and collaborating with the great directors who were my silent mentors of the stage and screen. I spent numerous evenings and weekends going to all the national theaters absorbing and dreaming and learning lines to be performed the next day in my drama class.

Why pursue acting as a career?
I was inspired to act so that I could become immortal to myself. Parallel lives are fantastic realms to delve into.

Left Top, gloves and coat **Maison Margiela**, hat **Pierre Cardin** Archive
Right Full look **Emporio Armani**

You’ve played an array of roles - how do you approach character development and preparing for each new project?
The preparation for a role is something somewhat private. It is like a detective unfurling aspects of the human soul unknown or known to me, like opening a cabinet de curiosité. I know now that it is the intricacies and the contradictory aspects of the human soul that I am deeply interested in and some directors do not want that kind of depth. So I’m less interested in that kind of surface acting now.

As actors, you have the challenging task of embodying characters whose morals and values don’t necessarily align with your own, and this dichotomy can even take a toll on you psychologically. You’ve acted in around 70 projects, was there ever a role that particularly impacted you and the way you now see the world?
Edith Frank, Anne Frank’s mother, whom I recently played for the American series A Small Light for Disney+, impacted me on a very deep and personal level. She had such resilience and humility in the hardest of times and maintained her dignity throughout the horror of the Holocaust. She had a very modern vision for bringing up and educating her daughters. She certainly did not have an ideal relationship with her daughter, Anne, in fact far from it. It was a turbulent and rocky one, full of humiliation, as Anne often belittled her mother in her diary.

Left Dress **Alainpaul**, jewellery **Panconesi**
Right Coat **Junya Watanabe**

Tell us about the show La Maison, Apple TV+’s newest fashion drama out in 2024.
My role is one of the two protagonists, a complex role that transcends the fashion world, and I was waiting for some material like this to get my teeth into. The show deals with the old world and the new world, the clashes of generation and adaptation. I cannot, as you understand, disclose much but all I can say is that we are dealing with human beings who suffer, who love and are unloved, who have scars and issues.

You previously explored the Parisian fashion industry in the film Saint Laurent, but also as a model in your early years posing for Chanel and Jean Paul Gaultier. What pushes you to engage with the fashion industry in your acting and how does the show differ from other films and shows that recount the story of a fashion house?
You see, the problem with the fashion industry is that it pushes people to become addicted to beauty, excess and more. Human beings tend to want MORE and MORE of a good thing. La Maison has a very unique take on things, as it is about family feuds and glamour in a rather Shakespearean way. My character has to deal with power and what it means to be powerful as a woman today, without being a male stereotype caricature.

Left Sweater **Duran Lantink**, skirt **Alainpaul**, shoes **Loewe**, tights **Falke**
Right Dress **Alainpaul**, jewellery **Panconesi**

Last summer, you were a narrator/récitante for The Indian Queen at the Salz- burg Festival - what is your relationship to the opera?
Opera and music are the art forms that have always been very present in my life and are necessary and vital parts of it, as they bring together sound and vision. For The Indian Queen, I collaborated with Peter Sellars and Teodor Currentzis. As a narrator/récitante, I was the voice of three women who existed: all women married to or daughters of the great conquistadors who brutally invaded their lands in South America. The text was amazing and written by the Nicaraguan feminist writer Rosario Aguilar. I had sixteen monologues all intertwined with Purcell’s heart-wrenching and delicate music.

Can you talk about any upcoming projects or roles you’re excited about and what drew you to them?
To my gratitude and great surprise, I now have an international classical musical agent based in Germany, so I will hopefully be collaborating with contemporary composers as well. And that is something I am greatly looking forward to doing, alongside my film career. I am also looking forward to future collaborations with Luca Guadagnino and Tarik Saleh, some of the [most] fabulous filmmakers around today.

You have been actively acting and performing since 1995. What are your thoughts on the changing landscape of the entertainment industry, and how do you stay adaptable? Was there ever any pressure to stay relevant as an actress for you?
I think integrity, tolerance and curiosity are the keywords I try to maintain in my vision as a human being and actor. These lines written by Dryden for The Indian Queen seem very appropriate and befitting to today’s world, to conclude our interview: “Why, why should men quarrel here, where all possess as much as they can hope for by success.”

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