Martin was born on January 1, 1991, and spent her early childhood in Paris but moved to Japan when she was seven where she lived with her father until she was thirteen. She then returned to France. After finishing school, she moved to London to follow her dream of becoming an actress and took up modeling to fund her living. She also used the money she earned to pay for private acting classes and also studied the Meisner technique of acting at the Actors’ Temple.[1]
The life of new face Stacy Martin has been getting rather hectic of late and it’s all thanks to a certain film by Lars von Trier called Nymphomaniac – Volume 1. Not your average debut film, then. Here are 5 things you need to know about Stacy Martin.
The apple of Lars von Trier’s controversial eye and flourishing muse, Stacy Martin, has literally burst on to the scene, thanks to the sexually charged role the young actress has taken on for Trier’s Nymphomaniac – Volume 1. She shares the role of Joe with Charlotte Gainsbourg but playing the younger version while Never one to shy away from controversy, we all know that when Lars Von Trier’s name is jotted down as writer and director we are in for a hard-hitting ride and any females cast are going to get a rough time. Assuming that you have seen the promo posters of big names and new faces alike, capturing them in the midst of an orgasm, plastered on buses, billboards and in magazines? Well, they give you an inkling as to what four-hour sex-fest is set to entail.
Nymphomaniac star Stacy Martin talks sex, nudity and porn doubles
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Next big thing: Stacy Martin
Newcomer Stacy Martin has gone from modelling to being Lars von Trier's new muse. Charlotte Cripps meets her
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The unknown actress Stacy Martin, 22, is Danish film director Lars von Trier's latest muse. The former model with Premier Model Management, who was too short for the runway and looks like Jane Birkin, stars in his new movie, Nymphomaniac, which follows the erotic life of a woman from birth to the age of 50.
The provocative film in two parts, which features real sex scenes with porn doubles in softcore and hardcore versions, will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Starring alongside Shia LaBeouf as his girlfriend, Martin is the younger version of Joe aged 15 to 31, a nymphomaniac, played later in life by Charlotte Gainsbourg – so its handy Martin looks like Gainsbourg's mother Birkin.
"What scared me wasn't the nakedness but it was interacting naked. Shia was very professional but we didn't actually do anything sexual," says Martin meekly, who is sitting in a café in London's Covent Garden. "That was left to the porn doubles. It's a totally different industry. The porn stars finish the job off for you. I never thought I'd meet my porn double," she laughs.
Martin remembers when she met von Trier in Copenhagen last year. She had always admired his films including Dogville starring Nicole Kidman, Melancholia starring Kirsten Dunst and Antichrist, starring Willem Dafoe and Gainsbourg.
"I'd only had three hours sleep because I was so nervous. I decided to stay awake on the plane so my eyes weren't puffy. Suddenly he was there in front of me, I was speechless. We just stood there starring at each other for a very long time," she says.
Von Trier and Martin talked a lot about what she could bring to the table as far as the character was concerned. "We were clear this film wasn't about nakedness, but that it was part of the story. So I was comfortable with it. Lars wanted to celebrate the female desire and show we have flaws, we are human beings and not perfect," she says. "There was a lot of pressure on me as the vehicle of his vision. He said to me, 'Just take it day by day, scene by scene. It will all come together.' There is an element of trust. I had to keep remembering that he chose me, or else I wouldn't be there if I wasn't capable. Sometimes I was rubbish and he allowed me to get that out of the way."
But it was challenging for Martin, who had no acting experience, to be thrust in front of the camera as LaBeouf's assertive girlfriend, with more naked scenes than most actresses have in a lifetime. It was filmed over 55 days in and around Cologne. The first part of the film is about Joe's younger life, the second part is when Gainsbourg takes over. The two parts of the film do not follow on from one another but are interwined.
"As the younger Joe, she is aware she is a sex addict but not to the point that it is a disease. At 15, she's just discovering men and friendships in the 1960s," says Martin. "It is a very interesting relationship she has with her boyfriend.
Martin, who is "itching" for her next role, joined an A-list cast including Uma Thurman, who plays one of her lover's wives, Christian Slater who plays her father, and Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard, as an older bachelor, who listens to the nymphomaniac's life story told through Gainsbourg.
"In one scene I wear disgusting tight red high-waisted spandex pants which were absolutely vile with a zip and slutty tights and a tiny top like a handkerchief for a night out on the pull," she says in horror. "I looked in the mirror and kept telling myself, 'You can do this'. But the film is about a lot more than sex. There is a lot of humour which I hope people will understand. It is a story – it's not a porn movie."
The half-French Martin, who goes out with Daniel Blumberg, the singer of indie band Yuck, grew up in Paris. She lived in Japan from the age of seven to 13 with her dad, Rene, a hair stylist and her mum Annette – then she returned to Paris until she moved to London aged 18 hoping to make it as an actress. Modelling was just a side job to fund her life in London – she saved up to do private acting classes, studied the Meisner technique of acting at the Actors' Temple, and studied Media and Cultural Studies at the London College of Communications.
She had two auditions in London and one audition in Copenhagen for von Trier's film. "When a few weeks later I heard I got the part, it was like, 'OK, don't freak out'."
She says von Trier is "extremely quiet" on set and "gives a lot of freedom". "He doesn't give you tons of instructions, just lets you improvise. He will sit and see what you come up with. To work in that way is fabulous." A lot of the film was shot on a handheld camera. "Whatever happens, he gives a lot of power to the actors he works with. You are not like a puppet. He moulds the work rather than makes it concrete."
She says she never sat down with her older self, played by Gainsbourg to discuss the character but the two performances were allowed to merge naturally. "I haven't seen Charlotte's scenes but I've heard we match pretty well. Originally Lars didn't want to cast me so the fact I look like her mother Jane Birkin was not the reason why I got the part. I got it because I did a good screen test," she says.
Peter Aalbaek Jensen, von Trier's producing partner, claimed the director "wanted to see the sexual arousement of a girl" on screen. Skarsgard told The Hollywood Reporter the film is "sexually explicit but, believe me, it will be a very bad wanking movie". LaBeouf said: "I know he's a very dangerous director; I know we are trying to do something different."
The film goes back and forth over the years looking at Joe's life and her background – often scenes were filmed spontaneously. Martin says: "What was challenging to play was her determination. I'm the kind of person who will make sure everybody is OK. She is the opposite – she is very focused on what she wants and very mathematical. It was also challenging because it was my first film and it was with Lars and other big actors and I thought, 'This is a big shoe to step into'. But I just had to jump in there."
She is already excited about attending the premiere in a few months, but also wary. "I'm quite nervous about my parents seeing the film. My mum is naturally feeling quite protective. It's quite embarrassing for me to see myself have sex. I might be hiding my eyes."
In her (quietly) explosive cinema debut, Stacy Martin has emerged as one of the boldest new faces in film, says Jo Ellison in the April 2014 issue of Vogue.
So the casting director said, 'Don't worry, you'll have a porn double - and a prosthetic vagina.'"
Rather than delivering the punchline to a particularly lewd joke, Stacy Martin is actually describing the process by which she was cast in the role of the libidinous Young Joe in Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac. As debuts go, taking on the lead in a four-and-a-half-hour exploration (nay, evisceration) of female sexuality, as imagined by one of film's most controversial directors, is one of the boldest. But, for 22-year-old Martin, the decision was elementary.
"I was a fan… so I knew the world could open," Martin shrugs as she calmly sips a cappuccino in the cloistered silence of the Royal Academy. "Not that I expected to get it at any point because there's about a million girls who look like me, with dark hair, who want to be an actress, and everyone was saying how competitive it is and how I'm going to have to do all these shit plays that no one comes to, and you get a tomato thrown at you… And so I met Lars in Copenhagen for the screen test, and then I came back to London and continued with my training and looked for the next step. And it turned out that the next step was going to Belgium to film Nymphomaniac."
Hailed as a masterpiece at its world premiere in Copenhagen before Christmas, Nymphomaniac has now arrived in Britain, in two parts. An episodic film, it is framed around a series of conversations between the 50-year-old Joe (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, for whom the film was written) and the Samaritan-like saviour (Stellan Skarsgard) who discovers her near-dead in the street one night. Inspired by the random details of the strange confessional in which she finds herself, each chapter charts Joe's gradual enslavement to her libido: Martin takes the character from virgin teen through sexual awakening, experimentation to marriage at 32, and then Gainsbourg takes over and far darker, more disturbing lusts are sated.
Like so many of Von Trier's films, this one provokes all sorts of reactions: horror, distaste, admiration, irritation, hilarity, tenderness and anger, sometimes all at the same time. And while much has been made of its unflinchingly graphic content, the film is anything but titillating. Sexy it ain't. Martin, with her implacable face, sylph-like contours and enigmatic stillness, brings a cool inscrutability to the role. "I spoke to Lars about her," explains Martin of her character, "and we agreed that Joe's the kind of person that doesn't really need to speak. She's doesn't need to justify herself, she's quite happy just being. And that really helped, because it instilled a kind of quiet within me. Joe doesn't feel she owes anything to anyone."
It's been said that, in Martin, Von Trier has found a new favourite - an actor, like Gainsbourg, Skarsgard or Willem Dafoe, with whom he will likely work again. But the director has a reputation for eccentricity: Björk reputedly ate her costume on the set of Dancer in the Dark, so maddened was she by her experience of working with him, and an ill-judged comment about Nazism at Cannes in 2011 sent him into media hiding. So what is he like to work with?
"Lars has a lot of anxieties… and insecurities… and a lot of Danish humour," says Martin. "And Danish humour doesn't always play well in other countries and I think it's difficult for him to gauge that. But I don't think you'd really notice if Lars entered this room," she continues. "He's very demure, and very quiet. He took me aside the night before we started filming and said: 'I can't make this film if you are uncomfortable with me or with the scene, and if you are - and I completely understand - you have to tell me. Otherwise we can't go forward.'"
For Martin, being comfortable meant availing of a porn double - a bizarrely flat-chested actress "who's really famous in Germany" - and the aforementioned prosthesis. "I mean, why not?" she says. "It meant I didn't just focus on being uncomfortable, but on my work, the scene, and what I needed to do, and that was really important for me…" She stops and thinks. "Mind you, it took three hours to fit every day, because there's a hard layer - because the point of it is for you not to feel anything - and then there's a skin-like layer, and then they actually put on what looks like a chicken fillet, and then they have to blend it all in, because it's quite delicate, and then they add hair… I've got a picture. I can show you if you like?"
Despite her Modigliani-like impassivity, Martin is a far warmer and more engaging character than she first appears, with a quick and candid sense of humour. Born in France, she moved to Tokyo aged seven with her parents (her father is a hairstylist), before returning to Paris as a teen and then escaping to London "and freedom" aged 18 to read media and cultural studies at London College of Communication. To supplement her student budget, she also did some modelling, about which she was reluctant but resolute. "To actually be independent financially was a big luxury," she explains. "Modelling gave me an independence, it gave me responsibility. I didn't have to work at McDonald's. I could save up and choose the training that I wanted to do." She earned enough as a model to pay for acting classes at the Actors' Temple, where she continues to train today, but she was too much of "a dwarf" to enjoy huge success. She is still tiny, struggling even to fill the Saint Laurent samples she borrows for press events - "I usually end up wearing a pair of my own jeans" - but she's arresting to look at, with long, mahogany-coloured hair, alabaster skin and etiolated limbs. She has the same androgynous skinny-jeans/cashmere-sweater style as her filmic doppelgänger Gainsbourg. And, like Gainsbourg, she speaks English with the crisp, round consonants of a girl on exeat from the Cheltenham Ladies' College. I am only reminded that English is her second language when she asks me to define the word "effervescent" - which she sort of is, in a very quiet, very gently fizzy kind of way.
Picture credit: Harley Weir
One thing's clear, Martin's unlike other young actresses, fresh out of drama camp with their prepared anecdotes and their accents-on-cue and repertoire of songs. She's friendly but not ingratiating, bright but not self-consciously so; she doesn't seek to impress. Currently she lives in east London with her geeky-chic boyfriend, a musician and artist who has seen the film, met Lars and was "actually really cool" about seeing his girlfriend being deflowered by Shia LaBeouf.
"Stacy is a real thinker. She's quiet," says her Nymphomaniac co-star Sophie Kennedy Clark, who plays the more extroverted Bea. "She can be quite serious, whereas I go to extremes in a 'cabaret Sophie' kind of way. I think that's why we work so well in the film together - we really gelled."
Having now lost her cinematic virginity, what will Martin do next? She's already shot a British drama, Barking at Trees, and is signed up for a film with the American director Anthony Lucero, but can she surpass such a debut? Martin is sanguine about the future. "I'd love to work with any director who has their own artistic vision, their own stamp, and who believes in that," she says. But she doesn't have a plan. Her peripatetic childhood seems to have left her with a hunger for adventures and strange new challenges. "Being in a new country, learning a new language - it isn't something that scares me. I'm not worried about suddenly ending up in a city I don't know." Neither is she overly concerned with having a plan. "I'm just so happy to see where this takes me. And if I don't do anything, I can always say I've been in a Lars von Trier movie." She grins. "And that I've got a porn double."
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