Inside Vanessa Kirby’s Mercurial, Darkly Funny Take on Napoleon’s Joséphine

The strangest thing about watching Napoleon, particularly the scenes between the eponymous French emperor and his first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, is that you quickly realize you’re watching a very dark comedy. That’s in part a credit to director Ridley Scott, who brings an absurdist sensibility to the bizarre power dynamics between one of history’s most notorious war commanders and his mercurial empress. But the tone is ultimately sold by the chaotic, boiling chemistry between their portrayers, Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby.

Kirby especially goes in directions you don’t expect. Her performance is impossible to pin down, a marvel of emotional contradictions and compelling resoluteness. In her unyielding stare and poise, it’s easy to understand how she’s slowly driving the world’s most powerful man completely mad. And in the relationship’s more intense, painful, and even traumatic moments, Kirby imbues Joséphine with a subtle empathy, a lifetime of experiences registering across a nervous flicker in the eye.

With Napoleon in theaters this Thanksgiving weekend, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated Kirby (Pieces of a Woman, The Crown) joined Little Gold Men for an in-depth conversation about building the most enigmatic character of her screen career. Read on below, and stay tuned for Thursday’s episode.

Vanity Fair: There’s a fascinating power differential between Napoleon and Joséphine. When you go into a movie called Napoleon, about Napoleon, you’re expecting this epic portrait of this brutal war general, and instead, in your scenes, you get this portrait of this really resolute woman and this very insecure, at times very strange man. How did you approach it?

Vanessa Kirby: We both felt it was one of the most fascinating, contradictory, and complex relationships we’d ever come across. [Laughs] I urge anyone to go in and explore it more. His letters, for example, even as a starting point—it’s unbelievable that you have this, as you say, military general who’s out there on the battlefield, instigating war and conquering land, and then rushing back to his tent to write these letters, which almost feel adolescent in their obsessive-compulsive nature. He wrote to her nearly every day, and she didn’t write him back in the early days at all.

Looking at their decades-long relationship—how dependent they were on each other; codependent, really—we felt the power shifts within it, the need to possess, [less] a maturing and more a fusing with each other and a need. In any relationship where there’s extreme need and there’s something unhealed in them as individuals when they come together, there’s inevitably going to be something that’s naturally volatile.

You’ve talked about the openness you had with Joaquin to let loose and go off from what was on the script. I believe the slap in the movie, for instance, was improvised. How did that dynamic between you as actors develop?