The world, according to Julie Delpy, is becoming a hateful place. “I think there’s sadly more violence to come our way and there are so many wars everywhere,” the French actor-writer-director says. “It’s stressful to be a witness of that, but we need to all keep our cool and just be rational and listen to one another, even people you disagree with.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with what she’s saying; she is not incorrect when she talks about how easily influenced people are now by fear. Or how concerning it is that not only in her home country, but globally, there is a slide to the far right.

It’s just striking to hear talk of fear from a woman who has spent the past 30 years bringing its opposite to life on screen: love.

World events are on Delpy’s mind thanks to her latest role, as a fictional French president in the Netflix drama Hostage, in which her icy President Toussaint is blackmailed and corrupted by the system. “I’m a little concerned with leadership and how easy it is to manipulate,” the 55-year-old explains, as she gets comfortable on a sofa in Netflix’s London headquarters. Delpy, in a navy pinstripe suit and thick black glasses, with two structural tendrils of blonde curls framing her face, looks every bit a leader, albeit a beautiful, almost handsome, one. Gone is the rosebud-faced ingénue of romantic comedies, whose natural wisdom gave characters like Céline in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy their quiet charm. So is the abrupt impulsiveness she brought to Marion in her own romcoms, 2 Days in Paris and 2 Days in New York. As the French president, Delpy is cold, hardened. “It was interesting to do something so opposite of what I am,” she says.

Delpy says she is not a conspiracy theorist; anyone can see that our leaders are controlled by tech oligarchs and the super-rich, who have little care for humanity, she laughs drily: “There’s big business out there that is above presidencies.” And those presidents? “They’re disposable, too, by the way. Probably as much as a child in Sudan is disposable sadly. We are all disposable to them, so what do we do?”

As a teenage actor in France, Delpy was already unusually ambitious, with big opinions. She was just 14 when Jean-Luc Godard cast her in his 1985 film Detective, and a string of major movie roles – along with wanted and unwanted attention from male directors – followed. Her mother warned her about it. At 15, Delpy received a letter from a director saying, “If you wanna play a lover, you have to know what love is.” “At first I was like, ‘That’s so sweet, he loves me.’ My mom was like, ‘This is bulls***,’” she remembers. “It was very glorified in France, the Pygmalion thing,” she says, alluding to the Greek myth of a man who moulds a girl into his masterpiece and falls for her. “It wasn’t really as much [of] a rape thing, but it was more seducing young women and I really didn't like that energy.” She’s talking offhandedly about the French trend of old directors with very young “muse” girlfriends; not for her. “I’ve always been with men my age, and I’m not interested in that weird dynamic.”

In her early twenties, Delpy instead became a Hollywood import to escape being sexualised so heavily on and offscreen. “Then I got to LA and one of the first people I met was a victim of Harvey Weinstein, and I was like, ‘Oh s***, it’s here.’ It’s the same stuff.” The uglier parts of the film industry made themselves known almost immediately. She batted them away. To avoid the whims of powerful men, she started writing. Looking back now, she thinks it was a wise decision; it gave her a good life.

‘I hate superficial matters,’ says Delpy (Getty)

Much like Céline, Delpy is inquisitive, sophisticated, witty. Each subtle flick of expression in her face is loaded and unpredictable. She speaks in sudden, honest turns. On cosmetic surgery, for example – something she hasn’t entertained, obviously – she says: “It’s true that I’ve never done anything to my face. I don’t even pluck my eyebrows. I don’t shave my legs. I don’t spend a lot of time on the looks thing.” There is work to do, and besides: “I hate superficial matters.”

It’s unsurprising that this woman could handle the predators she encountered in the film industry. “I was such a pretty girl that I was really a target, but I was strong,” she says coolly, like she’s staring down the barrel of a gun. “Luckily I was raised by people that gave me a lot of strength.” Both parents were actors, of whom she speaks adoringly; her mother was a feminist activist, and her father was a “feminist in men terms”.

More recently, she discovered that she has ADHD and is potentially on the autism spectrum. “My parents were told I was on the spectrum when I was a kid and they were hippies; they were like, ‘Whatever, who gives a s***,’” she laughs. “It’s probably the best way to do it.”

When the #MeToo movement happened, she was pleased, mostly because she never thought the abuse would actually be confronted. Still, for Delpy, whose early honesty about these issues earned her a reputation for being difficult, the problem isn’t only the perpetrators themselves – it’s the whole machinery that keeps them in power. “It’s good to arrest the villain, but the villain is supported by a system,” she says. “Individuals are able to act out on their impulses based on what system we’re in that allows the impulses to happen.” It’s not just about outing the predator, but asking who kept feeding him, paying him, awarding him.

Suranne Jones, left, and Delpy in a scene from ‘Hostage’ (Netflix)

Patriarchal systems often make themselves known in less threatening but nevertheless tedious guises. In 2019, Delpy spoke about being paid “about a 10th” of her co-star Ethan Hawke’s fee for 1995’s Before Sunrise, and for the second, Before Sunset, released in 2004, she believes she received about half of what he was paid. “I think it upset Ethan because it made it sound like he was… he was not happy with that quote, even though it was sort of a joke, and we make the joke between each other sometimes,” she admits now. For the third in the trilogy, 2013’s Before Midnight, she insisted on pay parity. “Maybe I wasn’t [paid equally] on the third one and they just told me I was,” she laughs. “Maybe I’m delusional.”

It’s assumed – based on a few quotes over recent years – that Delpy might be the one standing in the way of a fourth Before film. But in reality, both Delpy and Hawke turned down Linklater’s concept for a fourth movie, in which Céline could die of cancer at 50. Delpy laughs, imagining the grim trajectory: “And then the fifth one, he’s with his secretary who’s 20 years old?” Still, she won’t rule it out completely. “We didn’t come up with a good idea as a group, and what’s the point of doing a bad fourth film, or something that didn’t make sense? I don’t know why Richard thought her dying was a good idea, because I think it was not good…”

The almost laughable frankness feels right, because this trilogy belongs just as much to Delpy and Hawke as it does to Linklater. They shaped that first film through improvisation, even if their names weren’t there on the credits – something Delpy has never hidden her frustration about. By the second and third films, they were full writing partners, and Before Sunset brought them an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in ‘Before Sunrise’ (Warner Bros)

Delpy’s own experiences of love were siphoned into Céline, evolving alongside her character in real time. “That first movie, a lot of what I wrote into her came straight from journals I kept when I was 19, 20. I was a total hopeless romantic,” she says, the memory softening her voice. It was her idea, too, to have the star-crossed couple plan to meet again six months later. “I was like, ‘If they’re having that night of love, I’m not not meeting him again.’”

During the making of the second film, she was at a low point in her love life and poured that discomfort into the script. The third film – to my mind the strongest – finds Céline and Jesse caught in the mundane rhythms of everyday life: older, wearier, and struggling in their relationship. It’s a poignant continuation of the ending of her earlier romcom, 2 Days in Paris, which she wrote and directed. “There’s a moment in life where you can’t recover anymore from another breakup,” Marion, Delpy’s character in that film, concludes in the voiceover. “And if this person bugs you 60 per cent of the time, well, you still can’t live without him.” Ultimately, Céline and Jesse seem to make the decision to stay together in Before Midnight – captured in a 5am scene that Delpy doesn’t regard as her best performance, perhaps partly because she had no role in writing it.

“You grow up and realise it’s not a romantic comedy anymore,” Delpy says of Before Midnight’s realism. “It’s interesting because now my vision of love is different again [from that] because I’ve also grown from my forties…” Delpy has been married to Greek production manager Dimitris Birbilis since 2015; they live in LA with her son, Leo Streitenfeld, from a previous long-term relationship with film composer Marc Streitenfeld. She struggles momentarily to describe what middle-aged relationships are to her. “I actually wrote a 200-page script about it that I haven’t made and probably will never make, but it’s about the daily thing of being a woman in a relationship – it’s actually quite sad in a way. You have to give up some dreams and live in reality. I’m a very practical person, so I live very much in reality all the time.”

Choosing to love doesn’t always make life easy, anyway, she thinks. When Delpy’s beloved mother died in 2009, not long after her only child and son was born, it was a heartbreak for her, and notably for her father: “Is it better to spend all your life with someone? When they die, I see it with my dad and mom... It’s a tragedy when one of them dies.” This loss was put into her writing of a speech in Before Midnight. You know the one. They’re all sitting around that beautiful dinner table, eating al fresco and talking about relationships, and Natalia, an older Greek lady, speaks at length about missing her dead husband: “We’re so important to some, but we are just passing through,” the character says.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy face an ambiguous future in 'Before Midnight' (Sony Pictures Classics/Everett/Shutterstock)

Delpy starts to well up with tears and briskly swallows them, straightening her blazer. To think about that scene always makes her emotional, she says, her voice uneven. “I cry every time because it’s like, how do you live after someone you love so much and then they’re gone, it’s so hard.”

Few people get one relationship for the entirety of their life, like Natalia or Delpy’s parents. Each relationship brings out something different in you, because every person you’re with is different, I say. “I think you stay with someone when you feel like most of the best parts of yourself are in that relationship,” Delpy replies.

And love can never be perfect, she adds. “There is no perfection. That’s why I’m trying to teach my son about me being this imperfect person.” Suddenly she remembers that 16-year-old Leo is currently on a flight to Los Angeles, ahead of starting the school term tomorrow. She scrambles to pluck her phone from wherever she’s left it and starts to message him, mumbling, “I hate when he flies. I really hate it. It gives me so much anxiety.”

That’s love. Delpy is typically oscillating between two priorities like this, she says: her family and her career, especially her writing. Right now, she laughs, holding up both hands and counting slowly: 10 scripts. Her ADHD hyper-focus, so helpful for her career, can get in the way of intimacy. “It can be this intensity that is actually annoying for my family because I’m not there, I’m gone. When I write, I’m in another planet; I literally escape this world completely into it.”

When she returns to the everyday – to the mess and weight of real life – she tries, however imperfectly, to stay hopeful, if only to offer her son some version of a future where good things might still be possible. So don’t expect the naive romantic to appear again in her own work: “I like politically conscious material lately,” she says. “It is, to me, more important than ever to be conscious of the world we live in and what we’re heading towards, because there are a lot of forces in play.” That vigilance? That’s an act of love, too.

‘Hostage’ is out now on Netflix

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