Years before she became famous for Call My Agent!, her hit film-industry satire, Camille Cottin already knew what it was like to breathe the same air as Hollywood royalty.
In 2008, when she had only just started her career, the French actor was cast opposite a huge star in a Japanese-language commercial directed by a high-profile film-maker. “It was in Normandy with Wes Anderson and Brad Pitt,” she says, laughing. “It was surreal – really, really surreal.”
Pitt and Anderson were complete professionals. But the experience was nonetheless the perfect preparation for the role for which Cottin would become acclaimed a decade later: that of the perpetually frazzled French talent agent Andréa Martel in Call My Agent!, now back as a new Netflix movie.
[ Call My Agent! season four review: The best thing since buttered croissantOpens in new window ]
The rejuvenation of Call My Agent! will be a treat for fans, who will be delighted to hear that Andréa will be rubbing shoulders with celebrities such as George Clooney and Eva Longoria in this feature-length revival. But its return is a strange experience for Cottin, who had already finished filming the fourth and final season of the series by the time it became a smash in the English-language world in the summer of 2020.
“The set was being destroyed. It was something we thought we would never come back to,” she says.
She was done with Call My Agent! But Call My Agent! was not done with her. By the time the season aired, Covid and Netflix audiences globally had enough time on their hands to fall in love with the show and with Cottin’s portrayal of the tightly wound Andréa, as she was driven to distraction by the whims of pampered stars, including Monica Bellucci and Sigourney Weaver, portraying exaggerated versions of themselves.
“It’s a show about work,” Cottin says. “People living together, sharing some offices, being a family, fighting each other, but at the same time being inside the same group. So I guess it’s not only about the backstage of the industry but really about how people work together.
“I think people probably were really happy to go back to the office because they missed their colleagues and this vibe and tone. Maybe it’s not such a coincidence that it was a lockdown success.”
The added irony, she explains, is that it had been a struggle to get Call My Agent! off the ground in the first place. The series was based on the experiences of the real-life Paris talent agent Dominique Besnehard, who had spent more than 20 years soothing the egos of out-of-control A-listers. But there was scepticism about whether anyone in France, let alone audiences around the world, had any interest in a dramedy that pulled back the veil on the Gallic film industry.
“It was difficult for them to finance the show at the beginning, because nobody believed that it would be interesting – they thought that it was something too niche,” Cottin says. “And that only the people in the industry would be curious about it.”
It wasn’t until the world opened up again that she came to understand just how true to life Call My Agent! had been. Andréa might have been a movie veteran, but the industry was new to Cottin, a stage actor for much of her career.
When she started on Call My Agent! she didn’t appreciate how close to the bone the show cut in its skewering of movie-star egos. She has since gone on to a high-profile movie career in both French- and English-language cinema. Laughing, she explains that today she understands all too well how true to life Call My Agent! is. It’s a satire that is barely satire.
“All the stories from the episodes were true stories. They were all inspired by Dominique Besnehard’s experience … Then afterwards I experienced some of the situations in my professional life – I came across some of those experiences, some of those situations. Or I turned out to react exactly how a character had reacted in the show.”
The Call My Agent! movie has lots of what fans loved about the series: it starts with Andréa trying to maintain order on a film set, only for the project to take a turn for the disastrous. But it also has some pointed things to say about the French film industry, with Andréa making a cutting joke about Gérard Depardieu, the icon of French cinema who in May 2025 received a suspended sentence after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two women on a film set in Paris.
His conviction was controversial in France, and many prominent figures in the film industry, Brigitte Bardot among them, came to his defence. As far back as 2023 Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, said that the actor had been the target of a “manhunt”. Such reactions have added to the sense that #MeToo has not resonated as strongly in France as elsewhere.
“That’s a fact,” Cottin says, her frustration plain. “There’s probably an older generation really withholding this movement or denying the undeniable. We’ve had some troubles with people, even with Depardieu, with politicians saying he’s a national treasure and you cannot attack him.”
There is a “cultural thing” in France where men are left off the hook, she believes, although she was encouraged to see her fellow actor Judith Godrèche call out what she claims is the industry’s “incestuous violence” and the use of film as “cover for illicit trafficking of young girls”.
“Slowly, little by little, we’re getting there. But women’s words are still doubted. It’s a very long process, and Judith Godrèche has worked on it, rewinding also a whole kind of cinema – like nouvelle vague, where older directors often cast young actresses in the part of the ingenue, and the whole kind of relationship that was romanticised between old directors and young actresses. And how, in the eyes of the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, it was supposed to be romantic” – whereas in some cases, Cottin believes, it was paedophilia.
If Cottin says this with the perspective of an outsider, it is because she spent some of her most formative years outside of France. She was born in the second arrondissement of Paris in 1978 to an artist father, who painted buildings on the side to make ends meet, and an English-teacher mother.
Her parents separated when she was a child, and as a teenager she moved to South Kensington, in London, with her mother and her stepfather, who worked in finance. She attended school in the UK for five years.
Cottin may not have been an experienced screen actor before Call My Agent!, but she had spent time in the spotlight. She was famous in France as the star of Connasse, a cringe comedy from 2013 in which she played an outrageous alter ego (the title loosely translating as Bitch) who tried to wind up random members of the public.
In Paris it was sometimes a struggle to get a reaction from people: she was just another over-the-top French woman, so what was the big deal?
[ From the archive: French acting heavyweight Isabelle Huppert backs #MeTooOpens in new window ]
She had a better response when she moved the show to London and was arrested climbing the gates of Buckingham Palace, demanding to be let in to see Prince Harry.
Call My Agent! was a stepping stone to appearances in Killing Eve, as the assassin-mentor Hélène – a role she secured after attending a casting agents’ networking event in Kilkenny, of all places – and the action film Stillwater, where she appeared opposite Matt Damon.
When it became known that Netflix wanted to revisit the series with a film, she wasn’t sure if she could go back to playing Andréa – or even what the future would hold for the character, who’d finished the series bereft after the collapse of her talent agency.
“It’s a funny feeling. The interesting thing was that, when I met her again, five years had passed for Andréa. So the time I have been through as Camille is the time Andréa has been through.
“The interesting thing was that she’s changed. She quit her job. She is trying something new. She is a beginner again. It’s not the same Andréa as in the show where she’s at the top of her job and one of the best and knowing how to do her job. It was interesting to have this strong character and self-confident character in a situation where she has to learn everything from scratch.”
As the new movie gets under way, things have moved on for Andréa and her former colleagues at the ASK talent agency. Season four ended with the firm going out of business, forcing Andréa and the gang to scatter to the four winds.
Fast-forward half a decade and Andréa is an aspiring movie director. Meanwhile, life has brought plenty of surprises for her suave former boss Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert), her hyperactive colleague Noémie (Laure Calamy), Mathias’s ambitious love child, Camille (Fanny Sidney), and the talent agent and aspiring actor Gabriel – essentially a stand-in for Besnehard – played by Grégory Montel.
Call My Agent! arrives in the midst of a busy period for Cottin, who will follow in the footsteps of Helena Bonham Carter to play Madame Thénardier in a French-language production of Les Misérables and reunite with Pitt for The Riders, in which the US star plays an Australian living in Ireland who sets out in search of his missing wife and daughter. (Cottin was briefly in Ireland for the production.)
She’s back in Paris now, in a new apartment she has just moved to with her partner, Benjamin Mahon de Monaghan, an architect, and their two children, Léon, who is 17, and Anna, who is 11. But unlike Andréa’s glamorous digs in the city of light, it is, for now, a bare-boned affair, with exposed ceiling struts and big skylights. “We still have no kitchen,” she says, laughing. “But we’re very happy.”
After season four of Call My Agent!, some fans told Cottin they were disappointed with the way things worked out for Andréa, who was exiting on a low. Cottin is glad the film will help right that perceived wrong.
“They said Andréa normally she always wins in the end. She makes mistakes. She’s goofy, but she has such a strong character. It’s good to have her back.”
Call My Agent! The Movie is on Netflix from Thursday, September 10th
