the essential
On Saturday, actor Tomer Sisley, filming in the region, had lunch at La Grillade in the city center. The owners were surprised by his arrival but kept a nice memory of it.
15 days ago the actor was at the Cannes Film Festival and this Saturday he came to eat in a restaurant in downtown Castres. At midday, the team at La Grillade restaurant, located near Place Jean Jaurès, had a nice surprise. Tomer Sisley came to eat in their Castres establishment. The actor, having played in “Largo Winch” and “Balthazar” is currently in the region to film the series “Surface”, soon to be broadcast on France 2.
“It was around 1 p.m. and a hotel in Castres called us to find out if we were still taking customers,” says Ibrahim Nouri, one of the owners. When they accepted the last minute reservation, the restaurateurs were not aware that the actor was hiding behind it.
“We served him a rib of beef”
Ibrahim is not a movie buff: “I knew I had already seen his face but I didn’t recognize him right away.” The actor came accompanied by a man “perhaps his agent”, supposes Castres. “There were only two of them, there was not the rest of the film crew,” explains Ibrahim. When coming to eat in the “100% meat” establishment, Tomer Sisley was looking for a good place where he would not be noticed: “He did not want to eat on Place Jean Jaurès, he wanted a little more discretion”.
“We served him a rib of beef,” says Ibrahim. For the restaurant it is a success since the feedback from the actor has been very positive: “He told me that he will be there until June 20 and that he intends to come back”.
As a souvenir of this memorable and unexpected lunch, Ibrahim was able to keep a nice photo with the actor in front of the restaurant bar.
Since last Wednesday, the film crew of this mini-series of six episodes of 52 minutes each, adapted from the eponymous novel by Olivier Norek released in 2019 by Michel Lafon and several times awarded, has in fact set its cameras in the south of the Tarn. The main roles in this co-production of Quad Drama and France Télévisions have been entrusted to Tomer Sisley and Laura Smet. The screenplay is written by Catherine Touzet and Marie Deshaires, and the direction is handled by Slimane-Baptiste Berhoun who notably directed Vortex, a series broadcast on France 2 last year already with Tomer Sisley in the lead role.
Filming is currently taking place in Vabre and will continue in Rouairoux, at Lac de la Raviège and in Mazamet until July 31. The production had also launched several calls, notably through our columns, to find local extras to appear in this series.
Laura Smet, the daughter of Nathalie Baye and Johnny Hallyday, plays a Parisian police captain, assigned to a police station in a small town in Occitanie after an intervention which disfigured half of her face. She suddenly finds herself immersed in a disappearance case dating from twenty years ago. A barrel containing the skeleton of a child rises to the surface of an artificial lake, at the bottom of which lies an ancient submerged village… Tomer Sisley, who we also saw in the hit series Balthazar on TF1, would play a diver behind the discovery of the cold case at the center of the plot.
