Léa Seydoux has joined the cast of Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Separate Rooms’

It’s a brilliant day for anyone who loves beautiful women. Léa Seydoux, the actress described as “the type of woman you carry a picture of in your locket during war”, has joined the cast of Separate Rooms, the upcoming project from Italian director Luca Guadagnino. In her first collaboration with the man behind Call Me By Your Name and Bones and All, she’ll star opposite Josh O’Connor, for whom Separate Rooms will be his second project with the auteur. Later this month, O’Connor will also hit our screens in Guadagnino’s Challengers, where he gets into a steamy, tennis-based love triangle with Zendaya and Mike Faist.

What’s Separate Rooms about, you ask? In the simplest sense, it’s Guadagnino going back to what he does best. The book that the film is based on is a queer love story and in that sense it’s a nice little hark back to Call Me By Your Name, the film that paved the way for not only Guadagnino’s skyrocketing directing career, but birthed this truly era-defining TikTok edit… You know the one. The 1989 novel by Italian author Pier Vittorio Tondelli follows Leo (O’Connor) in the aftermath of his lover’s death. As he flees to England and tries to descend into anonymity, he ruminates on his relationship with Thomas. While it’s not clear where Séydoux’s character comes into that, we don’t doubt she’ll slot in rather nicely. Over the past few years, Séydoux has become catnip to the biggest directors, grabbing roles in films by everyone from Sam Mendes to Denis Villeneuve.

How to get ahead of the Separate Rooms curve? That’s a toughie unless you’re fluent in Italian. What we can deduce from a quick little trawl through some online booksellers is that the 1989 novel hasn’t yet been translated into English. It wouldn’t be impossible to get some Italian under your belt and read the book before the film’s release (nothing has been confirmed, but we reckon it won’t hit our screens until some time next year), but it’s obviously quite an undertaking. The more realistic mode of Separate Rooms-prep comes in the form of sinking your teeth into the other Seydoux, O’Connor and Guadagnino offerings we will get sooner rather than later. Not only is Challengers hitting UK cinemas in just a few weeks, but O’Connor is likely to get a fair bit of critical attention for his role in La Chimera, which is released on the 10th of May. When it comes to Seydoux – and this is if you can manage to prise yourself away from the Google Image results for the actress – we’d recommend checking out Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, where she plays three different characters set across three different time periods. That’s right: three Léa Seydoux’s in one film. It’s like Christmas.