Eric Cantona — the actor and philosophical sketch artist perhaps better known as one the finest and most combustible footballers in history — closes his eyes and starts whistling Edith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’amour”.

It is somehow unsurprising. This is exactly why Britain fell in love with Cantona in the 1990s and why his years at Manchester United were the centrepiece of one of the most thrilling epochs in the beautiful game. It takes only moments of meeting the 51-year-old Frenchman to discover that he remains, first and foremost, a performer. On the field, in his pomp, he could electrify tens of thousands of fans every time he made contact with the ball. Off the pitch the performance was even more audacious — a scene-stealing role as the French pseud surrounded by barbaric Brits.

His reign defined not just the stunning success of a dream team that featured David Beckham, Roy Keane and Ryan Giggs, but the tectonic shifts — led by huge TV deals — that reshaped English football. There was a swagger that infused the era, and Cantona’s was the biggest and most brazen. The game was then in the throes of becoming a global, televised circus. His superstardom, he says, arose in part because “I understood before the others what the circus was”.

When the whistling comes to an end, 32 seconds later, the Frenchman’s expression is unmistakable: that defiant, imperious flare of entitlement that accompanied every sublime goal, every telepathic pass, every thoroughly deserved red card and every enigmatic pronouncement flicked towards the media. Two decades since his retirement from the professional game, and even with his once trademark upturned collar neatly turned down, he could still ignite a stadium.

“The whistling? My kids used to like it. Nowadays they tell me to stop,” he shrugs, convinced of its brilliance but acknowledging, as one dad to another, that we can sometimes be embarrassing to our children. He asks whether I would also like to hear a more piercing whistle he uses to summon dogs. I don’t, but he does it anyway. It is quite fabulously piercing. Heads around the restaurant jerk to attention. No dogs appear.

Cantona, the Marseille-born son of a nurse and a dressmaker, did not need to whistle to be the centre of attention. An hour and a half earlier, he had arrived, rather late, at the Commune Social to find me halfway into a Bloody Mary. He does not accept the offer of something similar, opting instead for a mug of hot water, a gesture towards his larynx and a display of his professionalism as an actor. There is no point arguing: after appearing in more than 25 films since 1997, Cantona now takes his acting as seriously as he once took his football.

Asked whether he would ever consider a return to the game, he replies immediately. “No. Only to manage Manchester United?.?.?.?They won’t ask me. Maybe that’s why they didn’t win the Premier League. Only I could have made them succeed [after Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement]. Nobody else. Only me.”

We are meeting at a friendly, higher-end Shanghai brunching spot beloved of expats — cramped and informal enough that one of the three bankers at the next table is cheerfully earwigging our conversation. Various people, including one of the bankers and several Chinese kitchen staff, interrupt our lunch for selfies. The restaurant, built into the brickwork confines of a former police prison cell, has been recommended to me by a British diplomat as Cantona enters the final days of a two-month film shoot in China. It is a Franco-Chinese production called Magic, about which Cantona is tight on details — he says he will play “a nice man, but when you see him you won’t think that”.

For the most recent stretch of the project he has been in Turpan, a beautiful but remote city in the country’s north-western deserts. The various noises of appreciation — “magnifique!” and “parfait!” — that later punctuate our lunch suggest that the restaurant’s meaty, comforting, Mediterranean spread is stuff that he has missed.

After retiring from United in 1997, Cantona left football altogether rather than seeing out his thirties in one of several countries with “a lot of money but no history of football”. He took up acting and has appeared in what is now a decent list of films (Elizabeth, as well as an assortment of French dramas and comedies). To British audiences, his most famous post-football work is Ken Loach’s Looking For Eric, a 2009 film in which Cantona plays a hallucination of his Man Utd-era self experienced by a football-obsessed postman. The film brims with lines of soulful machismo (“I am not a man, I am Cantona”) that would not be unexpected coming straight-faced from him now, and he reveals, proudly, that he made important contributions to the script.

Loach, and Ferguson, he says, were geniuses who had a similar impact on his life. “Director. Manager. Football. Film. It’s just a different game, but still play, play, play,” he says, embarking on a more general thesis about work hierarchies. “I think the boss has a bad image,” he says, after an uncharacteristically long pause.

“In the media we need to make a good image for businessmen. Some of them are nice. Some are very creative?.?.?.?but if you ask the person on the street about the boss, he says ‘he’s shit’. Why? Because we all say that.” I note that Cantona did, in fact, say that of Henri Michel, the former manager of the French national team who, in 1988, Cantona publicly described as a “bag of shit” in a TV interview. The window is small, but I see an open goal. What about his own relationship with managers?

“I respect the boss. I loved some of my bosses,” says Cantona, weaving out of danger. “That was the secret of Alex Ferguson. We loved him and we respected him. That is the job of the boss — to be loved and respected.”

And how about Guy Roux? I ask, speaking of the manager of Auxerre who gave Cantona his first job in professional football, but had to deal with his protégé punching a teammate in the face.

“Yes, I was like a son. We had a very strong father-son relationship. That doesn’t mean everything was nice. No. I was like a teenager. He was like a father and we had a lot of fighting together but in the end we loved each other.”

But, I begin to say?.?.?.?

The waiter, who is French and crimson with excitement, materialises at the table and I realise we haven’t ordered. There is a brief to and fro, during which Cantona rapidly agrees to all the waiter’s recommendations, before steering conversation to the evils of mobile phones and why he bans his children (aged four and eight, by his second marriage) from going near them. “I don’t want to live in the world of phones,” he says, suddenly sniffing at the air like a deer and tasting some imaginary food plucked from the forest floor, “I want my senses to be always activated. I want to feel nature. I want to focus on smells, nature, the sound of words, the sound of birds?.?.?.?” — he runs out of inspiration and glares at the table — “?.?.?.?a fork?.?.?.?”

The food — all sharing plates — conveniently starts arriving and suddenly, the flinty professionalism behind this digital debunking dawns. Cantona has just released a book called My Notebook that shows off some of the thousands of sketches he makes, as a constant hobby, in a Moleskine. He archly suggests this habit is the anti-thesis of the mobile phone — a pen-and-ink engagement with the world, rather than the seditious virtuality of the screen.

Cantona historians will surely identify in this artistic oeuvre echoes of the press conference he delivered in 1995 at the end of an eight-month ban from the game, the result of the inglorious night at Crystal Palace when he aimed a flying kick at a racist fan. As he now recounts it, he didn’t want to say anything. The rules (in this case Manchester United’s lawyers) required something, however. “They said I should just say anything, so I said anything,” he says.

His 21-word response (“When the seagulls follow the trawler, it’s because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Thank you very much”) remains among the most memorable lines ever uttered by a footballer, and sealed Cantona’s image as a Gallic pseud in shorts. He remains sniffily unsure how many of the journalists in the room understood that they were the seagulls in question.

I induce him to explain, with 20 years of hindsight, what drove his career. “I was just someone who always, totally wanted to give everything to the game all the time. That’s it. And to be on the field with everyone who wants the same — that is unity. That is beauty. The outperformance of the individual in service of the team. It is the most exceptional education,” he says, forking scrambled egg and salmon towards his plate after checking that I have had my fill.

“But at Manchester, even that was different. That is why I have always said it was like going home. A different energy. More energy. You have more passion for football in England than in France. I felt that immediately. Of course the game is loved everywhere, but in England it is real passion,” he says, pausing to check whether this is profound enough. “You can buy everything except passion,” he ends, just to be sure.