French “It” girl and actress Roxane Mesquida has made some interesting career choices. In “Rubber,” released earlier this year, she played a woman pursued by a vengeful killer tire. You know, the kind that’s attached to a telepathic car. This spring, Mesquida appeared as a sapphic sorceress in “Kaboom,” a film that was called “a sophomoric exercise in black comedy, supernatural excess and apocalyptic silliness mixed in with straight/gay/bi soft-core porn” by the Hollywood Reporter, but received rapturous applause after an out-of-competition screening at Cannes.
Mainstream projects don’t seem to appeal very much to the 28-year-old actress. Dividing her time between Paris and Los Angeles, Mesquida’s goal in Hollywood is to work with edgier filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Gus Van Sant or Quentin Tarantino. “People think you go to Los Angeles to make big Hollywood movies, and I went to Los Angeles because I felt it was really a platform for meeting directors from all over the world,” she says. “I want to be in unusual movies. They are always the type of films that elicit extremely violent reactions: People either love them or hate them.”
While she polarizes people through her acting, Mesquida has managed to elicit only affection from the fashion industry. She’s become a ubiquitous presence at the Paris collections and is on the cover of the summer issue of French magazine Citizen K. She is also the unofficial muse of Canadian shoe designer Jerome C. Rousseau and hints she may begin work soon on a beauty or fashion ad campaign. (Roland Mouret, Jean Paul Gaultier and Martin Margiela are among her favorite designers.)
Mesquida insists the adoration is mutual. “I love fashion,” she says. “I dream of producing [totally uncommercial] movies and to be a kind of benefactor. So if an advertising campaign allowed me to invest some money to support a film, that would be great.”