This Thursday, January 16, Beijing Express will be back on M6 with The Route of the Legendary Tribes which will take place in Africa. Among the ten pairs in the casting, we will find, like every year, a pair of unknowns, played by Moâde and Ludovic. Going to the other side of the world in the company of someone about whom you know nothing, on paper, the idea seems absurd. Yet, every season, the production of Beijing Express receives on average no less than 3,000 applications from single people, out of a total of more than 40,000 registrations. “For me, adventure is the unknown. So I wanted to live it to the end… with a stranger!”justifies Ryad, emblematic face of season 18 of the M6 program. Louison, his sidekick with whom he is hosting this year Who can beat Ryad and Louison? in the second part of the evening, remembers, amused: “The moment of the meeting was super awkward”.
Binomials of strangers in Beijing Express : “IThey go through the same casting as the other candidates.”
“It’s a real headache to find a good pair of strangers, with very different profiles, but it’s a fantastic promise for viewers who we want to surpriserejoices producer Thierry Guillaume. Concerning the casting process, he specifies: “One of the basic rules is to take people who are different, even opposed. There is no particular test, they pass the same casting as the other candidates, with the same questionnaireexcept that obviously, we ask them who they would like to be with and who they would not like to be with, and they suspect that we are going to put them in someone who is very different from them. We are increasingly looking for positive stories and this has been true for several years, with pairs of unknown people who go quite far and who leave an impression on viewers.”. Each year, the teams rack their brains to try to find a pair that will please viewers. “There is always a personality that immediately explodes in our faces. This was the case with Ryad in 2024, with doctor Étienne in 2022, and this year with Ludovic. We then end up finding our ideal partner.”reveals the producer. He specifies: “Ryad we had in our boxes, he’s someone we had spotted for a few years but we didn’t really know who to put him with. And then, Louison showed up for the casting and we said to ourselves: ‘That’s a funny association’“.
The producer of Beijing Express 2025 about Moâde and Ludovic: “It’s the first time that a duo of strangers have gotten to know each other so quickly.”
Listening to the duos thus formed, there would even be a major advantage in discovering your partner on the starting line: “A loved one, we know his faults. So automatically, we argue more“, summarizes Nathalie, associated with Angie, in season 17, returned in season 19 for the All-stars edition The epic of the Maharajas. If the spark doesn’t strike every time, it often happens that these two strangers ultimately become friends. Like Fabrice and Briac, from season 12. “At the beginning, it didn’t really fit between us. But as we dug deeper, we realized that we had a lot of similarities”slips Briac. “I have to see Florian as much as my parents! There is a sincere friendship that was born from this adventure”assures Gabriel, finalist in 2018. The fact remains thatin 20 seasons, none of these pairs of unknowns have won Beijing Express. “The strength of the bond between candidates is often decisive”analyzes Thierry Guillaume. Will Moâde and Ludovic defy the statistics this year? “They are super determined. This is the first time that a duo of strangers have gotten to know each other so quickly.“underlines the producer.
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