In Daniel Auteuil’s new film, an excellent thriller, the actor puts his natural tenderness and good nature to the service of a dark and enigmatic character.
In the cinema, there are professionals in the know-how who use, with communication strategies, all the modern tools to announce their news, and there are guys like Grégory Gadebois whose know-how is enough to attract attention. His career, which has taken him for twenty-three years on the boards of the Comédie-Française and elsewhere, and on many film sets, is more eloquent than the confessions that this Norman can deliver, far too modest and instinctive to praise or analyze his own work. But the artist is so interesting and the man, so likeable, that we do not always resist the urge to talk with him. Especially when he delivers, as in The Thread, a dazzling performance.
«What made you want to make this film?
– Daniel Auteuil!», he answers immediately.
With him on both sides of the camera, Gadebois could offer himself a high-flying duo with him while putting his name on the poster of a captivating thriller. In order not to break the suspense as to the possible guilt of the one he plays, Gadebois is content to describe him as “a guy crushed by the judicial machine who, for the first time, will feel listened to by a man from the class above and who has the codes of a system of which he knows nothing” and explain how he played it, “scene after scene, without asking too many questions.” But generally speaking, the actor is not one of those who intellectualize acting too much. He trusts the writers, the directors and his instinct to bring his characters to life.
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The first to give him a leg up was Jérôme Bonnell: “I asked him if I could come and see him on the set of the Olga’s bun, but as he didn’t like having intruders around, he asked me to play the brother and open a door.” Eric Besnard, for his part, has become a loyal follower: after Delicious, Simple Things et Louise Violet (in theaters November 6), he has already planned to meet him again in 2025: “I like his writing, his world, the people he chooses to talk about.” As for Michel Hazanavicius, he offered it to him in Cut! a comic role that he loved, then made him travel from Perche where he lives to Cannes, where the film opened the 75the edition of the Festival. Recently, he called him back to entrust him with the voice of the lumberjack in his animated film, The Most Precious of Goods (released November 20).
A Sergeant Garcia for Dujardin
A solid actor and good comrade, Gadebois thus triggers a little taste of coming back. Anne Fontaine, who dreams of him behind Henri Matisse’s glasses, has already slipped him into the skin of a father (Marvinou the beautiful education), of a cop (Police) and even François Hollande (Presidents). Jean Dujardin, who played opposite him Sarkozy and Colonel Picquart in J’accuse Polanski wanted to make him his Sergeant Garcia when he became Zorro.
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If his partners are loyal to him, Gadebois shares this quality by regularly meeting up with the team Flowers for Algernona wonderful one-man show created twelve years ago that he will reprise at the Théâtre du Petit Saint-Martin in March 2025. He also cultivates his curiosity. It recently took him to Hungary where he joined László Nemes The Son of Saul to embody a lonely, ugly and mean man who will enter the life of a young boy in Budapest in 1957. A role to play all in Hungarian. We wish him good luck.
The Threadby Daniel Auteuil (in theaters September 11).
