After making a name for himself in his native France – particularly with his collaborations with action director Luc Besson, including Le Femme Nikita (1991) and Léon: The Professional (1994) – actor Jean Reno then crossed the Atlantic to become a sought-after character actor in big budget Hollywood films including Mission: Impossible (1996),  Ronin (1998), The Pink Panther (2006), The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Da Five Bloods (2020). The 73-year-old national treasure shows no signs of slowing down, he tells press at the recent Monte Carlo TV Festival, where he admits almost with embarrassment, that he has three TV shows about to launch.

A Private Affair (Spanish, Amazon Prime) – A Spanish-language drama set in the late 1940s, when a wealthy woman and her faithful butler (Reno) set off to catch the serial killer responsible for a wave of prostitute murders.

All Those Things We Never Said (French, Starz Play) – A French-language comedy based on the Marc Levy best-selling novel about a father-daughter relationship that ends on her wedding day when he dies. A day after the funeral, a crate arrives that contains a life-size android that is a carbon copy of her father, who explains he contains all the memories of her father with a battery life of only seven days and persuades her to go on a road trip to make the most of it.

Who Killed Sara? (French, Netflix)) – Reno joins the show in a supporting role in its third season, following the search by Sara’s brother to find and seek retribution against whoever framed him for her murder.

Your last TV project was the 2013 miniseries, Jo. How did you end up returning almost a decade later with not just one, but three?

Who Killed Sara? was shot after A Private Affair and after All Those Things We Never Said. Some were edited much faster and put on the air much faster, so it just worked out that way. That’s always the risk of productions. It just looks like I was busier than I really was!

Why did you take on a Spanish-language show?

I am originally from Spain. I was born in Morocco, and my parents were of Andalusian origin. I didn’t even learn how to speak French until I was five years old. But I consider myself French and I realized that thanks to Johnny Hallyday (famous late singer known as ‘the French Elvis’) if you’re interested in the story. I was with him in Saint Barth once and we were driving in his convertible when we passed by the cemetery and he said, “I will be buried here!’ I’m not afraid of death but I realized I’d never thought about that question, and I’d lived in New York and many other places in the world. That’s when I found the place I want to be buried in France and now I know I’m really French.

Have you decided to pursue more television at this point in your career?

I found myself trapped during Covid waiting months for the phone to ring and then when it started, it didn’t f**king stop ringing! But all of the projects just happened to be television and shooting in France and Spain so I could be close to home and relatively safe during the pandemic. It was not a calculation at all, because my next projects are all movies and I really hope that people will go to the movie theaters again because I think it’s really bad in France, the talk of the death of cinema.

If you had the chance to come back as an android, what would you do?

I’m against going back and changing your life. I think life has already passed by and I don’t like the idea of being able to remake my life or rebuild myself or remove the scars that I have or the back pain or insomnia. I like the idea that I’m imperfect and I don’t like the fact the android is infallible. He doesn’t have a wrinkle, he doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t eat, and he has extraordinary erections! (laughs)

How do you play a robot?

I got the android part out of my head right away. That was the worst. How do you trust the fact that this thing opens up and you have another chance to fix things? Are you going to come out of the crate and say, ‘what’s for dinner?’ I had to believe he was her father also, not just an android.

Have there been any movies that have changed the way you think?

People will change me more than movies. I only want movies to be my work as an interpreter and not my therapy too. I prefer real life and I don’t think I’m more intelligent or closer to people because of the movies I’ve done. But there are some actors, when you see them working, you change as a human being because you start thinking. People like Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro, and Gérard Depardieu, you just watch them, and you evolve, in fact.

Have you ever considered retirement?

Like an idiot, a long time ago I said that I was going to stop around sixty and all that is bullshit. I thought about living on a boat or raising goats but all these thoughts that you have are because you think the grass is greener over there. So, I’m still over here, because I love this business, I love this group of people who say, ‘we’re going to make a movie’ and I love keeping the freshness and avoiding too much self-satisfaction. I hope I don’t sound annoying, but that’s how I feel today.