Noémie Merlant is currently raising the temperature in theaters with Women on the balconya sulfurous film which takes place at 46° in Marseille. But before devoting herself to cinema, the director and actress tried to get into singing almost twenty years ago by casting for The New Starwhich ended in a dismal failure. The young woman recently returned in The Original Soundtrack, from France Interabout the real trauma she experienced.
“My dream was to be a singer. They broke my thing at the casting, it was horrible,” summarizes the 36-year-old filmmaker. “I was so stressed that… you lose your voice with stress… so I probably didn’t sing very well,” she admits. Which does not justify the “violence” of what followed on the part of the emblematic jurors of the show, a sequence that the production would have chosen not to show. “In fact they covered their ears in front of me […] and I still had to finish my song,” she says, warning Nagui and her team that she is on the verge of crying.
“Go back where you came from”
And after describing his performance as “horrible”, the jury asks “Where are you from?” », the young woman struggles to articulate that she has just arrived in Paris. And there, the fatal blow is delivered by the jury: “Well, go back where you came from”. The humiliated candidate will find comfort in the arms of Virginie Efira, “a love”.
Noémie Merlant met André Manoukian again on his first TV show for Heaven will wait (2016). “He obviously didn’t remember me,” she noted. “I met him in the dressing rooms and he said ‘I loved everything you did’ and even something like ‘I would kill my dog for you’.” This bad memory, which was not admitted to the person concerned, however led to the most beautiful revenge with a career in cinema already crowned with a César and collaborations with directors such as Jacques Audiard, Céline Sciamma ( with whom she wrote Women on the Balcony), Louis Garrel and André Téchiné. The actress even starred alongside Kate Winslet in Lee Miller.
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