It’s a historic success! Three weeks after its release, the comedy “Un p’tit truc en plus”, directed by Artus, continues to break records. Best start, record admissions for 2024… This film quickly won over the public with its humor and its touching subject: disability. Actors Artus and Clovis Cornillac play two thugs who, to escape the police, pose as a mentally handicapped person and his educator in a specialized center. They then leave with the other residents and the staff who take care of them in the Vercors for an eventful stay. Besides, filming in an old barn was not easy!
If the film is so authentic and natural, it is because Artus himself was confronted with a disability. “My sister-in-law, my wife’s sister, is severely disabled”he confided to Le Parisien in 2022. “I have always had an attachment to difference. As a kid, one of the jobs I told my mother I wanted to do was: ‘walking the disabled in the parks’.” For this potential future millionaire, comedy helps normalize these still taboo differences. “There are lots of people who are uncomfortable, don’t know how to talk to them: but talk to them like a normal person! Humor is a desire to integrate them into normal life,” he explained.
Artus inspired by his own addiction
Artus is also a sponsor of the association Handicap International and has often worked with the disabled sports community. But his interest in this subject also comes from his own life and his addiction to alcohol. “I had this rugby side, I had this nag side, this slightly handsome side, which I still embrace. I don’t know how to do things by halves, so I stopped drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes… Otherwise, I could have been that guy who, at 40, is still hiding in excess, in partying“, he explained in the show “The Job Interview” on YouTube.
The actor, who lost 35 kilos in 4 months to feel better about his body, was in fact drinking too much alcohol. Excesses which had a very serious impact on his health, to the point of suffering from serious epileptic attacks. “It’s violent! It’s so scary to do it that it really helped me stop. We convulse, […] we hurt ourselves very much. I bit my tongue very hard, the blood vessels in my face exploded because everything stiffened. And the worst part is that afterwards, you’re completely disoriented. I could have jumped through a window, if it had been open, to get out.” Enough to nourish a deeply human story about the way others see things and resilience in the face of difficulties. Subjects he will surely talk about on Laurent Delahousse’s microphone in the show “8:30 p.m. on Sunday” on France 2.
