VINCENT CASSEL PLAYS PSYCHO RUSSIAN GANGSTER

Oceans 13 star Vincent Cassel stars in Eastern Promises as the son of a Russian mob boss who commits unspeakable crimes to remain in his father’s good graces. The French actor played a Russian before in Birthday Girl but this experience required that he infiltrate the Russian mafia.

Vincent tried to meet some of these gangsters in Spain where he was shooting another film but wasn’t exactly welcomed into their world.

“There’s a lot of prostitution as you might know in Spain, it’s legal in a way and its owned most of the time by the Russians. There was this little town called Dora Fuente and it’s only Russian mafia people. On the weekend I’d ask my driver, ‘I’d love to go there. I need to go and talk,’ and he’s say, ‘no I’m not gonna take you there.’ I say why? He say, ‘because if they know you’re an actor they’re gonna kidnap you.’ You just don’t fool around. It’s too violent. It’s too intense. I’ve seen some of those people in clubs over there in Russia but I didn’t have any relationship with them.”

Vincent was so believable as the psycho Russian gangster that it appeared as though he was living the role on and off the screen.

“Sometimes I even wonder if people who say that really do it because I don’t see how it’s possible. Can you stay five months or three months in character especially when you play a psycho? It’s very tiring. I’d rather let it go and live a normal life and resource yourself. I do dream while I shoot but I don’t dream of being the character. I just dream about ideas that will eventually nourish the character. I’m not a psycho actor, just a psycho character, that’s enough.”

Vincent is on a gangster roll. He’s shooting two movies back to back Public Enemy and Death Instinct about the life and death of the famous French gangster from the 70s called Jacques Mesrine.