Be other 3/5.- How to get into the skin of a character? Feel your emotions? Share your dreams? An infinite panel of mutations in which each spectator will identify. The actress deciphers her job.
On display in The Story of Souleymane (in theaters October 9), film by Boris Lojkine, Nina Meurisse helps us understand how to inhabit the body and mind of a sniper, a panicking mother, a hotheaded photojournalist or a a proven fishmonger, without burning her wings… And if the actress keeps film diaries, it is to document her path through metamorphosis.
Madame Figaro. – You have just finished filming the second season of the series B.R.I. (on Canal+) and found the character of Nina Perez, daughter of a gangster. Do you now know her intimately, this other Nina?
Nina Meurisse.– Nina, I love her for her eccentricity, her contouring, her Dolce & Gabbana clothes… I can afford everything, because she has nothing to do with me. I have actually already done all the work of inventing the character. I know his voice, his accent, quite strong but not too much. The more singular a character is, far from my personality, the more attached I am to it and the more I want to be fair.
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If the costume allows you to accompany your metamorphosis, what about your emotions?
To create his painting, a painter uses a spatula, puts pigments and sand on his palette to move forward in a realistic way. We also have tools to compose our score. The text, at the top of the iceberg, then it’s up to me to work with my empathy, by immersing myself in it, by imagining, by letting my instinct develop. Nina, I have to fill myself with her fatigue, her frustration, her dreams, everything about her has to be complex for us to believe in it 400%. Another example, Sam in the series Fever (on Canal+): I had to work on what I call the bottom of the iceberg, because he is a very intense character. Why does she take everything to heart? I have to make her emotions my own, to feel how they ramify in childhood episodes, the experience of her Jewish parents in Morocco, the fact that she was always taken for crazy… Her own prism , is that lightness has no place. It is with this entire invisible world that we manage to create an identification among the spectators.
How does this impregnation engage both the body and the mind?
During the two or three months of preparation, I need some idle time where I look at people, listen to music, have cards drawn by a friend, to give ideas time to develop. to germinate, to the character that of coming. Lately I played the role of a fishmonger (in the miniseries 37 seconds, soon to be broadcast on Arte, Editor’s note) and I cut up fish, I got up at 5 o’clock, I was cold, my feet were wet… The role is no longer in your head but written in your body. To interpret Camille Lepage, in Camille (film by Boris Lojkine released in 2019), I practiced photography for three months, learned the basics of editing… I understood what drove my character, her expectations when she presented her photos. On Fever, I suffered from a legitimacy complex: when Sam enters a room, his spirit takes over. My coach, who knows me very well, advised me to find her perfume to make it my own. And I came across a woody, spicy, masculine perfume. A scent that permeates the entire room, The Blazing Mister Sam (Penhaligon’s). With him, I managed to feel like I was in the mind of someone who saturates the space.
Spending your life living in the shoes of other women, isn’t that dangerous?
In order not to damage myself, to forget myself, I try to no longer use the “I” to evoke my characters. I use my emotional reserve, my life, to trigger an emotion, to quickly find the steps of the characters. But sometimes it’s not that easy. In the series Black hearts, I have shot a lot of torture scenes: these remain moments of intense life where reality and fiction are very porous. It’s difficult to pretend to suffocate for three minutes under a plastic bag. My coach pushed me to do treatments afterwards, as if to tell my body: “It was fake.” For the character of Camille, I felt that I had gone too far. We were filming on the site where she was murdered, in the lens I had the photos she had taken… I don’t believe in ghosts, but I felt inhabited. I shot fictional scenes that her mother would have liked to experience with her. It was too hard to leave her, she who had already died once. I wouldn’t say it’s dangerous, but it takes a lot to invoke these things (the actress cut her hair after filming, Editor’s note). It is a privilege, an intense joy to live for a few minutes in the mind of someone so different from you. But when I come back to my own life, I find it less lived in, less invested ultimately. I have to pay attention to it. Remember that this is all just a job.
