How the Tapie series was born 10 years ago in Laurent Lafitte’s dressing room
“It almost seems like an invented story and yet…” Director Tristan Séguéla tells us how he had the idea of developing a project around the businessman, after putting a wig on his actor’s head. ’16 or so’ era.
This will be the streaming event of the week: carpetthe Netflix series dedicated to Bernard Tapie will be released this Wednesday on the platform, 11 years after being imagined by Tristan Seguela And Laurent Lafitte…
In fact, it was in 2012, on the set of the film 16 or so, which gave rise to the idea of putting the resident of the Comédie-Française in the costume of the businessman who became a TV presenter who became the boss of OM who became a minister. While directing the actor in the shoes of a thirty-year-old victim of a sudden teenage crisis, the director has an epiphany:
“It’s almost made up history and yet, that’s how it happened” tell Tristan Seguela at Premiere. “On the first day of filming, almost 16 years old, I went to see Laurent in his dressing room. I look at him in his makeup mirror. And I say to myself: damn man, it’s crazy, you look a lot like Bernard Tapie. And you would make a fabulous Bernard Tapie in the movies or on TV! I thought it would be incredible to tell this fate in fiction. But I’m not the only one in France to have said that to myself. Many of us thought that this guy’s life was crazy and that he had to be adapted…”
The joke could have stopped there. Except that Laurent Lafitte then bounces: “He tells me that he has always dreamed of playing her on screen! It’s something that was brewing within him, so immediately, we started working on this project. It was more 10 years and it took time to bring it to fruition…”
Laurent Lafitte tempers and explains to us that his desire to play carpet “wasn’t born from that moment, that would be reductive. I didn’t put on a wig and one day and finding a resemblance, I said to myself that we were going to make a biopic! It would really be level zero of biopic (laughs) No, I’ve been thinking about this character for a while…”
Because for the star Small Handkerchiefs and of Dad or MomBernard Tapie was “un Alexandre Dumas-style character. I had thought for a long time that it was as much a person as a character. And so, as an actor, I was interested in exploring that.” And not just because he looked like Bernard Tapie with a wig. Besides, Laurent Laffite assures him: “When you really look…not that much. No, we don’t actually look much alike!”
Tapie, in 7 episodes, to see on Netflix from September 13.
