Performance: Romain Duris

There is a four-minute clip on YouTube of the 1993 screen test of Romain Duris, one of France’s most versatile, charismatic actors.

He was all of 18, a student at art school who also was a drummer in a band and a pizza delivery boy. He was discovered by a casting agent standing outside his school one day. With his wild hair, snaggle-toothed grin and je ne sais quoi attitude, Duris already had star quality.

Now 36, Duris remains disarmingly disheveled. He’s earned three Cesar nominations, including one for Jacques Audiard’s award-winning 2005 drama, “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” in which he played a real estate tough torn between his criminal life and his wish to fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a concert pianist.

Duris turns on the charm in his first romantic comedy, “Heartbreaker,” which opens Friday. A big hit in France, the soufflé casts him as Alex, a young man who earns his living as a professional Don Juan, breaking up couples. But he does have morals: He intervenes only with couples who are unhappy, and he never sleeps with a client. In a 10-year career, Alex has never failed a job. He operates his “company” with his sister (Julie Ferrier) and brother-in-law (François Damiens).

But business has been slow of late, and Alex is feeling the heat from creditors. So he must go against his principles when he’s offered a lot of money by a wealthy businessman to stop his equally wealthy and independent daughter, Juliette (Vanessa Paradis), from marrying the man she adores. With only one week before the wedding in Monte Carlo, Alex must try every trick in the book — including learning a number from Juliette’s favorite film, “Dirty Dancing” — in order to woo her away from her fiancé.

The slightly built Duris is sitting with a translator in a small conference room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. And he’s just as much a charmer in person as he is in “Heartbreaker,” especially when he laughs at the interviewer’s jokes.

He wasn’t looking to do a romantic comedy, he says. “I don’t make any plans of career,” Duris explains. “I am choosing characters with my heart and not with organization or plans. So this was very difficult. I didn’t want to do it at the very beginning.”

He had a lot of heart-to-heart conversations with first-time director Pascal Chaumeil. “I didn’t know him,” Duris says. “I had to trust him like I need to trust directors when I do dramas. There was something dangerous about the character I didn’t want to do.”

Duris says he didn’t want Alex to come off as a “James Bond of seduction. I wanted to add more humanity, fragility, doubts. It was a long process of molding stuff, adding some scenes and to trust my character and to believe in him. I like to play him more as an actor than a seducer.”

Duris and Paradis spent a lot of time rehearsing the erotic number from “Dirty Dancing” that had Patrick Swayze catching a soaring Jennifer Grey and lifting her over his head. “It was really fun and a real pleasure,” the actor says, flashing his smile. “We took it very seriously because we both love to dance.”

Duris earns a lot of laughs in the scenes in which Alex cries in his attempt to win over his clients’ hearts. He turns his face away from the woman and makes a painful expression in order to make the tears flow.

“It was one of the parts of the character I loved most,” he says. “I didn’t discuss with Pascal what strange face I should have. It was very natural for me trying to make a face when I find tears. It reminds me of the beginning of my career when I tried to cry for a movie; sometimes I had to find something very physical to find tears. So these scenes for me was a personal joke.”

susan.king@latimes.com