Jean-Paul Rouve readily admits this. Play Gabriel Matzneff in The consent by Vanessa Filho in theaters since Friday, has not been easy. “You have to dive very deep to interpret a man like him,” the actor confides to 20 minutes. What helps the most to get over it, once the film is over, is to tell yourself that you have nothing to do with it. »
Jean-Paul Rouve managed to forget himself to the point of being credible in the role of the writer who seduced Vanessa Springora when she was only 14 years old. “It was the idea of being useful by helping young people to be able to recognize real predators that motivated me,” he admits. Other performers have also brought to life on screen unsavory characters from more or less recent news stories. 20 minutes dug into their archives to recall how they approached these roles.
Explore the Dark
“It was the first time that I couldn’t understand one of my characters,” remembers Karin Viard. In 2018, she played a mother unable to support her daughter who was victimized by a family friend’s pedophile in Tickles by Andréa Bescond and Eric Métayer. “This woman’s behavior towards her child was so foreign to me that I was interested in playing her,” she confides. Pierre Deladonchamps, chilling as a child rapist in the same film, agrees with her on this point. “Being an actor also means knowing how to explore darkness and extricate yourself from it. It was surprisingly less difficult because it was Andréa Bescond’s story and she was on set making me feel like I was helping to understand what she went through. »
Adama Niane, actor who died this year but who was Guy Georges in The SK1 Affair (2013) by Frédéric Tellier, also knew how not to let himself be devoured by the serial killer he plays. “My duty was to show his part of humanity while keeping him at a distance,” he explained at the time. A work which also weighed on the shoulders of Emilie Dequenne at the time ofTo lose reason by Joachim Lafosse in 2012. “Telling myself that my character was going to kill her children while I was playing the mother of very young actors certainly helped me in my composition,” she explains. But it was very painful. » Even though the massacre scene is not shown on screen, the tension is so strong that the viewer almost has the impression of witnessing it. But why agree to suffer like this for your art?
Do part of it
“It is part of our job to also reveal the shadowy areas of beings and it is very interesting to construct and then very gratifying to see”, declares Guillaume Canet to evoke the killer gendarme Next time I will aim for the heart by Cédric Anger in 2012. And then some of these bad elements seem to have been born to become cinema icons. “How can you not want to play a man as complex and charismatic as Mesrine!” exclaims Vincent Cassel who slipped into the skin of the gangster for Jean-François Richet’s diptych. He’s a golden character for an actor because he put his life on stage. » In 2009, a César came to endorse his choice.
“The only thing that worried me sometimes is that it could be imagined that I espouse the cause of Hitler because I agreed to embody him, but I believe that the quality of the film and the unequivocal message that he gave justified this risk”, admitted the German actor Bruno Ganz, Swiss actor who died in 2019 who lent his features to him in The fall by Oliver Hirschbiegel in 2005. Fortunately for him (and for his sisters and brothers), the public seems to know how to distinguish between real life and cinema.