“This series is the missing link between Navarro And The expertsexcept that we are Palavas Experts. We have everything we need to solve the investigations but, in fact, we are helpless,” jokes Julien Doré. This is how the 41-year-old singer presents Panda, the police comedy, in which he plays the title role, launched this Thursday at 9:10 p.m. on TF1. He plays an ex-cop, retired in a hut, who returns to duty with nonchalance and causticity… A character tailor-made for the artist, as he explains to 20 minutes.
How did you end up on this series?
The production [Superprod Drama] contacted me a year and a half ago with a pitch. All I had to do was give my agreement for the teams to start writing and look for a broadcaster. I was just told about this character, Victor Pandaloni, nicknamed “Panda”, who was in the police and left everything overnight to open a beach bar in the south of France. I liked the idea. I asked that we film in Camarague, the territory of my adolescence. This kept us busy from the end of March to mid-July.
The idea was to build a character whose image corresponds to what can be projected onto you, that is to say a cool, sarcastic side, etc. ?
Yes. I had in mind the pleasure felt on the set of Ten percent [la série de France 2], few years ago. I wanted to rediscover this pleasure of gaming, without it being too polluted by the stress of playing someone who is extremely opposed to what I am, because that’s not my job. I wanted this character to resemble me enough so that I could find a saving balance. He made a life choice similar to mine [en 2018, Julien Doré a quitté Paris pour s’installer dans les Cévennes]. The screenwriters were preparing to write a character with empathy, respect for the living, who has the desire to cultivate kindness in a world where the codes are the opposite of that… I knew we weren’t going into something diametrically opposed to who I am.
“Panda” is a detective series that has a strong humorous tone. Is it easy to stay with this light intention from one scene to the next?
I was afraid of going on an adventure lasting several months alongside someone I wouldn’t get along with, or vice versa. Too many actor friends had told me that it happened and that it really wasn’t easy to deal with. But with Ophélia Kolb [qui incarne l’autre rôle principal, celui d’une policière], it was amazing. She listened. I observed the way she managed energy and I was inspired by it, that was the key to staying on the right intention. Given that it’s a sunny series, full of humor and burlesque, fatigue shouldn’t show on my face.
However, this is not your first experience as an actor. In 2010, you played one of the main roles in “Together, we are going to live a very, very great love story”. What memory do you have of it?
I look at it, let’s say, tenderly. I was coming out of “Nouvelle Star” and, a few months later, I was shooting this film by Pascal Thomas. The trust placed in me at that moment seems improbable to me. The film is what it is, but this proposal and these two months of filming still transformed my life.
And what do you think of “Pop Redemption” released in 2013?
It’s different. It was a total flop at the time of its release but I sometimes see it resurface on social networks, through random rebroadcasts. It’s an improbable film – the filming was just as improbable. I was still with Alexandre Astier, Grégory Gadebois, Audrey Fleurot and Jonathan Cohen in a daily heavy metal band mixed with a police investigation, in the South-West, under 40°C, with wigs… We played at Hellfest, after the Axl Rose concert, in front of the audience of this festival which is, it is no legend, the best audience in the world. Everything was there to have buckets of pee or beer thrown at us, but these spectators were nothing but kindness, benevolence and acceptance. As soon as it’s rebroadcast, something happens. People are like, “What the fuck, what is this thing?” ! “, but without destroying it. A few years later, I found myself as a guest on Ten percent. It was three or four days of filming but people still talk to me about it today, even though I must have five scenes.
Are you often offered roles in the cinema?
No. The rare times that I am offered things, it is often first films whose realization is conditional on the fact that I accept. However, it is difficult, because we feel that, even if I accept, it will not be feasible and we will not be able to succeed in doing it. In the rest of my life, I would rather play small roles.
What do you find in comedy that you don’t find in music?
A form of letting go in design. In music, letting go, I have it when I sing but only because I worked for a year on a show that I know by heart, to the second. When I play, there is constant frustration. Once my lines are said, it no longer depends on me. The director gives me acting instructions. It’s not easy because I’m not used to it, but it’s a lot of good. On the set of Panda, I sometimes turned my tongue seven times in my mouth about artistic things, shot values, for example. I was always glued to the cinematographer. I wanted to learn from these people who have a different approach to images than mine. But I could only observe.
Will this experience of filming “Panda” have an influence on the Zénith and Arena tour that you will launch in March 2025?
It’s still a little early to tell. My only goal is to redo a show, with innovations and creativity. The previous one mixed a lot of things: theatrical references, allusions to childish imagination, codes of big shows… There was also a mixture of humor and improvisation. My ambition for the future is, of course, to write songs and to inject my feelings about the world and the times, but also to create shows during which, for two hours, there is an element of dream. That we fly somewhere, while being aware, through the texts of the songs, of the world in which we live. May it be a moment where I will see the little ones, their parents and their grandparents experience a moment of transmission. I want something to happen. When my son said to me: “Make a fuss again,” it woke me up. I hadn’t planned it, I was getting ready to shoot Panda and I understood that this tour was going to save me from my poisonous pessimism.
That’s to say ?
I told myself that this would help me find my place again. Rather than giving my opinion on this world which does not need my opinion, my place, in this framework, that of the show, is useful to those who come to see me. I felt it on the previous tour, I saw it, people told me about it. When I called my team saying that I was going to do a show again, crazier, more beautiful, more poetic, the reactions were astonished. People said to me: “But don’t you write new songs first? » I don’t know, maybe, but what I want to do above all is a crazy show! We opened the ticket office and, in less than a week, more than 100,000 tickets were sold.
What does this great enthusiasm mean to you?
This represents more than a third of the places available and that means that the people who bought them have already made an appointment with me… This is the sign that the people who like me trust me whereas today ‘today we don’t even know if we will have the right to meet, if we will still be in a world that will give us the possibility… This confidence means that this is where I must speak, translate my thoughts, my revolt, what I have left of utopia, positivity, love. This will probably be one of the last times I make music on stage like this. Because everything changes, the relationship with songs, the way in which we listen to music… So the relationship with the stage, for me too, will change. The very principle of a big Arena show, I need to experience it one last time in this way…
To then do more intimate concerts?
Maybe. Or not. Or to be in something of the order of transmission and even stronger distancing.
Would you step back from the spotlight?
I don’t know, because the number of guys who announce that it’s their last tour and come back on stage, I find it stupid. I definitely don’t want to play on that when it comes to communication. But, deep down, I say to myself… (He interrupts) There is what I experienced in my meeting with Joseph Kamel.
Tell us…
I heard, by chance on a playlist, one of his songs on the train. I wrote him a message telling him that I liked what I listened to. I invited him to do my opening acts, then he signed with the same record company as mine a few months later. I left a Bercy where I sang with Clara [Luciani] and I went to see him at his first concert at the Café de la danse… This transmission – perhaps that’s not the right word – this relationship with the artists who arrive, let’s say, interests me more and more. I want to tell them to pay attention to this or that when they go on promotion, explain to them how to talk about themselves as best as possible. I’m describing the job of a sort of label (laughs). I want to put on shows, to be told “I’m going to play there. How would you see things with my songs? » I dream that my future time will be occupied in transmission, from an intimate point of view with my son, and professionally with artists. It’s not necessarily about writing and composing for others, but about supporting them. That would excite me.