Vincent Perez (born June 10, 1964 in Lausanne) is a Swiss actor, director, screenwriter, novelist and photographer of Spanish and German descent.
He's been acting since the mid-1980s, mostly in French cinema. He made his breakthrough in 1990 as Christian de Neuvillette in Cyrano de Bergerac, and was nominated at the César awards for it (two other nominations would follow). He's also known for having played Ashe Corven in 1996's The Crow: City of Angels and Marius de Romanus in the 2002 adaptation of Anne Rice's Queen of the Damned.
He has also directed two shorts and three feature-length films, two of which he wrote.
Selected Filmography:
Roles:
- Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) as Christian de Neuvillette
- Captain Fracassa's Journey (1990) as Baron Henri de Sigognac
- Snow and Fire (1991) as Jacques Sénéchal
- Indochine (1992) as Jean-Baptiste Le Guen
- La Reine Margot (1994) as Joseph Boniface de La Môle
- The Crow: City of Angels (1996) as Ashe Corven
- On Guard (1997) as Duke Philippe de Nevers
- Le Temps retrouvé (1999) as Morel
- The Libertine (2000) as Denis Diderot
- Queen of the Damned (2002) as Marius de Romanus
- Fanfan la Tulipe (2003) as Fanfan la Tulipe
- Arn: The Knight Templar (2007) as Brother Guilbert
- At Eternity's Gate (2018) as the Director
- An Officer and a Spy (2019) as Louis Leblois
Films he directed:
- L'Échange (1992, short)
- Rien dire (1999, short)
- Peau d'ange (2002)
- The Secret (2007)
- Alone in Berlin (2016)
Tropes & Trivia in his works:
- Fake Nationality: He's from Switzerland and has played in a lot of French films as French characters (being from a French-speaking canton helps).
- Mr. Fanservice:
- In Indochine, he spends most of his screentime staring vaguely past the camera with his open shirt flapping around his impressive pecs.
- He's also had a fair amount of shirtless scenes in some of the period pieces he's been in, those set in the 18th century at the heyday of libertinism in particular.
- No Stunt Double: He did use a stuntman for some scenes in The Crow: City of Angels. However, he insisted on doing the stunts in the final scene, including falling from a building from five stories up, being beaten with a whip, and being hung from a streetlight.
- Swashbuckler:
- La Reine Margot, On Guard and Fanfan la Tulipe (2003) had him display much kickass Cavalier Years rapier swordplay, and the panache that goes with it.
- Captain Fracassa's Journey is a subversion — it plays out more like a comedy/melodrama around 17th century theatre and heavily downplays the swashbuckler elements of the source material.
- Typecasting: He's been a regular face in French productions set in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, such as Cyrano de Bergerac, Captain Fracassa's Journey, La Reine Margot, On Guard, The Libertine, 2003's Fanfan la Tulipe and Jeanne Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour. Pretty much always as either The Charmer or The Casanova (his good looks helped).
