Catherine Deneuve Becomes Black Widow in Marvel Podcast: “It’s Not Bad to Be a Newbie”

It’s all improbable. And quite delightful. Catherine Deneuve in a Marvel. Black Widow herself. And in audio. The sixth and final season of “Marvel’s Wastelanders,” a series of narrative podcasts about superheroes and supervillains launched in 2021, has just been released (on Audible), and the 80-year-old star, who joined the team during the previous season, agrees to talk about it quickly on the phone. Marvel, really, would she be a fan?

“No,” she bursts out laughing. “I’ve never watched the films. And no, I haven’t seen Scarlett Johansson play Black Widow. But I had a lot of fun playing the game, all the actors standing side by side with a text, without any images. It’s very offbeat. I’d done animated films, like a Disney one (“Monsters University”). I’ve read a text by Virginia Woolf too, magnificent, and other novels, but it was completely different.”

No, she will never do theater

“We had a good laugh during the coffee breaks,” smiles the actress, surrounded by Antoine de Caunes (Star-Lord), Olivier Marchal (Hawkeye), Gérard Lanvin (Wolverine), Pascal Greggory (Fatalis) and Emma de Caunes (Valeria Richard). Valeria, “the most intelligent woman on Earth, immortal and solitary beyond all reason” survived a rain of nuclear missiles in Southern California. A mysterious force is spreading in the irradiated “dead zone” and it is up to the superheroes to identify it, in order to prevent Valeria from committing a crime. The podcast gives an even more imaginary effect to the world of the villains, with these multiple sound effects and a more sensitive humor in the dialogues: “Hello friends, sorry for being dead, all that…”

Catherine Deneuve has tasted almost everything in her long career, except getting on a theater stage. One last challenge to come? “Oh no, that’s not my thing. Theater is something else. I’m very happy that my daughter (Chiara Mastroianni) arrived there, in confidence with Christophe Honoré who often directed her in the cinema, for The Sky of Nantes. I thought she wouldn’t make it. I can’t. There would be too much stage fright. I had a project, it’s true, not so long ago. (in 2019)to play the role of Gena Rowlands in the stage adaptation of the film Opening Nightwhich was held by Isabelle Adjani. If I had played on stage, it would have been there. I didn’t get very far from it.”

Everything is possible, then. Even playing Marvel. And always being between two shoots, no less than four releases in 2024. The actress goes to the theater a lot, and to the cinema near her home, in her favorite theaters in the 5th and 6th arrondissements of Paris where she keeps a low profile and knows all the staff. Her latest favorite? “The Prisoner of Bordeaux”, with Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi. Deneuve in theaters to see Huppert, it could be a film. Superheroines. Just as indestructible as the animated super villains.