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Michael Vartan by Michael Haile
Venice Magazine, May, 1996

"I don't look typically French, so I probably could have worked a lot in films there," says actor Michael Vartan, who was born and spent much of his childhood in France. He smirks wryly as he explains how he first started acting in America. "There's a thing in France called mandatory military service, which I decided not to do. I guess that makes me a deserter. It's not likely they were going to fly a Foreign Legion squad over here to arrest me, but that made me decide I wasn't going back to France for awhile."

Ironically (considering his distaste for soldiering), it was his role as a young French officer in Napoleon's army in the Traviani brothers' 1993 Italian film Fiorile that first brought Vartan to the attention of American audiences. The son of an American mother and French father who divorced when he was five, Vartan spent his formative years travelling back and forth between the US and France. "I lived in California from the ages of 5 to 11, then in France from 11 through high school. I never thought about acting at all. In France, I lived in this little village, with cows and chickens on a farm. Show biz to me was watching 'Starsky and Hutch' reruns on French TV."

With All-American roguish good looks and no trace of an accent, Vartan seems more California surfer than French villager. After moving to Los Angeles when he was eighteen, his mother encouraged him to try acting, thinking it might be a way for him to meet his own age. As he recalls, "I never had a burning desire to be an actor, but I was curious to see what it was all about. I remember the first scene I had to do in acting class was Al Pacino from Scarface. I'm a nineteen-year-old kid from France, and I'm playing a Cuban drug dealer; [laughs] it was pretty strange.

Vartan, whose credits include the French features Un Homme et Deux Femmes and Promenade D'Ete and a role in , this month co-stars in Miramax's dark comedy The Pallbearer, starring David Schwimmer and Gwyneth Paltrow. "This is my first big American movie. It was nice to be part of an ensemble and to feel supported by everyone else. I liked the fact that it was such a personal story, that all of the characters have interesting struggles in their own way. I'm much more attracted to movies that have more of a dramatic real life feel to them."

An avid guitarist and hockey player, Vartan is currently working on Bart Freundlich's film, The Myth of Fingerprints, with Noah Wyle, Julianne Moore and Blythe Danner. "You know, I never expected to have an acting career, but now I know that this is what I love to do, and I'm going to enjoy every minute of it. It's very important to me to have fun. Because one day we're all going to be six feet under."

Smiling, he adds, "You know that, right?"

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