Léa Seydoux Opens Up About Horrifying Psychological Harassment Behind Cannes’ Most Controversial Film

During the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, French actress Léa Seydoux revisited her harrowing experience of filming Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 romantic drama, Blue Is the Warmest Color.

Both Seydoux and co-star Adèle Exarchopoulos have previously gone public about the grueling set conditions, especially the “horrible” manner in which the explicit scenes were filmed. They’ve both said they will never work with Kechiche again.

Kechiche won the Palme d’Or for it at Cannes 2013, but that didn’t shield the film from controversy over its graphic, prolonged intimacy sequences, especially after Seydoux broke down in tears during the press conference.

In the latest revelation, she shared which part of filming the movie was the hardest and how she has approached intimate scenes since then to avoid a repeat of what happened 15 years ago.

“The industry really needs to do better with how they treat actors on set,” one user said about her revelations.

Filming Blue Is the Warmest Color was “psychological harassment” for Léa Seydoux

Image credits: imdb

Léa Seydoux attended the 2026 Cannes Film Festival as the star of two films that premiered this year: Gentle Monster by Marie Kreutzer and The Unknown Woman by Arthur Harari.

During the event, the Dune actress opened up about the much-discussedBlue Is the Warmest Color once again in an interview with Brut.’s Augustin Trapenard.

Image credits: Getty/Pool

“Sometimes there are looks that make you feel uncomfortable,” she said in French about Kechiche’s presentation of her character in the film. “That was the hardest part during filming.”

“It was psychological harassment,” she confessed.

“It’s extremely difficult to shoot with directors who are manipulative. Obviously, all the plot devices are somewhat directed in a certain way to achieve a certain thing. But this was real, real psychological harassment, and that was very, very hard.”

Image credits: imdb

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“I couldn’t leave the film,” Seydoux went on. “Once you sign a contract, you are committed to a film, and you can’t leave.”

She added that she learned a lot from Kechiche as well, which has helped her in other future projects.

Léa Seydoux admitted her experience with Abdellatif Kechiche changed the way she approached intimate scenes

Image credits: Getty/Pool

Back in 2013, Seydoux admitted in an interview with The Independent that the intimate scenes of her and Exarchopoulos were filmed for hours, sometimes over multiple days, and the manner of it made her feel “humiliated” and “like a prost*tute” at times.

Her experience with Abdellatif Kechiche has not put her off from acting in intimate scenes. Depending on the story, she does not mind filming them.

Image credits: Getty/Gareth Cattermole

“It’s not something that I dislike doing,” she told Brut. “It puts me in a vulnerable position, but so do many other scenes.”

However, it did change the way she approached such scenes, which has been comparatively easier in recent years, thanks to awareness and regulations around intimacy choreography.

The look of actress Léa Seydoux during the press conference in Cannes in 2013 for the presentation of the film “La vie d’Adèle” towards director Abdellatif Kechiche says a lot about what happened during filming.
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“To know that it is supervised, that we have the right to have a say in the scenes — that is something I find extremely important,” she said. “I have a right to have a say in the scenes where I am undr*ssed.”

“I now ask to review every intimate scene, and that’s been the case since Abdellatif Kechiche’s film, where I want to have a say in whether I accept or not that my body is shown that way.”

But the presence of intimacy coordinators sometimes makes her “uncomfortable,” Seydoux admitted.

Image credits: imdb

“I am someone who is very shy,” she explained. “Acting is something that intimidates me a lot even today, even though I have done a lot of films. So I need to let go completely, because if I don’t, I can’t act.”

“With the intimacy coordinators, sometimes, all of a sudden, when everything becomes too organized, too framed, you have to do this, we’re going to make a scene like that, we lose a little bit of our instincts. I am speaking for myself; it bothers me.”

Abdellatif Kechiche called out the actresses for “indecent” complaints about suffering

Image credits: Getty/Dominique Charriau

Following Seydoux’s and Exarchopoulos’ comments, Kechiche hit back at the actresses and addressed allegations of harsh conditions on set.

“How indecent to talk about pain when doing one of the best jobs in the world!” the director said in French at the Los Angeles press conference of Blue is the Warmest Color in 2013, according to a report by The Guardian.

Image credits: geokonic

@mubiCrawling back to you 💙 BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche♬ do i wanna know cover by hozier – kiss ross

“The orderlies suffer, the unemployed suffer, and construction workers could talk about suffering. How, when you are adored, when you go up on the red carpet, when we receive awards, how can we speak of suffering?”

Around the same time, in an interview with French magazine Télérama, Kechiche said the negative comments around the movie had “sullied” it for him: “The Palme d’Or win only gave me a brief moment of happiness. Since then, I’ve felt humiliated, dishonored, living with a curse.”

However, Seydoux and Exarchopoulos were not the only ones to criticize his techniques.

Image credits: Figaro Magazine 

Julie Maroh, the author of Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude, the graphic novel on which the film is based, shared her frustrations on her personal blog after its Cannes 2013 world premiere.

Maroh called the movie a “brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian s*x, which turned into p*rn,” according to a 2013 report by The Hollywood Reporter. She also called out the lack of lesbian cast members in a story about two women falling in love.

“That has to be a crime.” Netizens voiced their opinions on Léa Seydoux’s experience on the set of Blue is the Warmest Color

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