The Actress Anamaria Vartolomei Brings a Fearless Streak to Her Roles

Anamaria Vartolomei began her film career when she was 12 opposite Isabelle Huppert in a film about a controversial photographer and her daughter. And in the past few years, Vartolomei, now 26, has blazed through a slate so ambitious that it resembles one of Huppert’s typically prolific runs — each film different from the last.

The Romanian-born actress’s recent rise began with a heartbreaking starring role in “Happening” as a French university student in the 1960s who seeks an abortion. It won the Golden Lion for best film at the 2021 Venice Film Festival — where the director Bong Joon Ho was the head of the jury. Bong cast Vartolomei in the dystopian film “Mickey 17” as a shrewd shipmate of Robert Pattinson’s repeatedly replicated drone.

By the time “Mickey 17” came out earlier this year, she’d projected a mesmerizing mystique in the French blockbuster “The Count of Monte Cristo.” Her fearless streak was also recently on display in “Being Maria,” in which she plays the actress Maria Schneider, star of “Last Tango in Paris,” and “The Empire,” a loopy intergalactic yarn set in rural France.

Her latest movie, “Adam’s Interest,” opens the Critics’ Week showcase at the Cannes Film Festival, which runs through May 24. Vartolomei plays a mother who risks losing custody of her child after he is hospitalized. In a video interview — seated beneath a wall of pictures featuring “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Breathless” and “Scarface” — she explained why the film’s raw realism appealed to her and how it was achieved. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

In your career, you tend to choose characters who have limited power or autonomy. But they do what they can with what they have.

Yeah, I love this. It speaks to me personally, and I think it speaks to everyone in a way. I mean, freedom belongs to us, but it’s hard to admit that we have power over it. Sometimes we feel like we depend on others’ perspectives regarding our freedom. You think about pleasing others, and you forget what you really want. I like characters that know they want something, but they don’t really know how to obtain it. They finally find a way because if they find their truth, they will find peace.