A notable passage from Akim Gagnon’s (largely) autobiographical novel, Granby in the simple pastin which a teenage Akim is told by an older, more experienced Antoine Bertrand to “follow his dreams,” a phrase that will become like his North Star.
But what did Antoine Bertrand’s dreams look like? “I don’t remember wanting to be anything other than that,” he replies, “that” designating the profession thanks to which, since Virginia In 2002, Quebec felt it had found in him a great buddy.
Ever wanted to be anything else? The proof: one day, in Old Orchard, when his parents, uncles and aunts are shown the exit of a motel where, with the help of alcohol, they were causing a bit too much noise, a worried 6-year-old Antoine asks his mother about the negative impact that this incident could have on his Hollywood career.
PHOTO DOMINICK GRAVEL, THE PRESS
Antoine Bertrand
His childhood heroes? Arnold Schwarzenegger and, above all, John Candy, from whom he says he borrowed a lot. “I admired his humor,” he explains about the late Canadian monument, “but also that there was always an undercurrent of tragedy in him. There was always a vulnerability, a flaw, a weakness that you saw appear in the same line that had just made you laugh out loud.”
Just think about it
This “difficult thread to play”, between the comic and the tragic, is where Antoine has taken up residence over the last 20 years, embodying characters in whose eyes several layers of emotions always shine, sometimes contradictory.
This is the case of his role in The Hidden Womanthe moving second feature film by Bachir Bensaddek (Montreal the white), also starring French actress Naïlia Harzoune, whose husband he plays, in tow of his wife’s quest for identity and intimacy.
“That’s the job, you know,” replies the actor when asked how his face and eyes manage to convey so many states at the same time.
But that’s what cinema also allows. On TV, you have to go and carry the stuff. In cinema, you have to let it come. The strength of cinema is that you just make people think about it and people see it.
Antoine Bertrand
Is it really that simple? “I always say: your inner garden, you have to put 20-20-20 into it, otherwise, nothing will happen on screen. I find that there are a lot of line-sayers in our profession when 90% of the job happens between the lines. If you haven’t nourished your inner garden beforehand, it will light up when you say the words and then it will go out.”
To give everything
Antoine Bertrand was for a long time “a powerful lazybones,” he admits, the kind who cherished the treasures that the pressure of the knife on his throat conjured up in his imagination. “I thought it was a good engine, I worked well in it, but at a certain point, all actors will tell you, you go home at night and you always replay the scenes in your car. And then you find things and you say, ‘That would have been good. I should have prepared myself.’”
It would be difficult today to reproach Antoine Bertrand for not preparing himself. A recent example: last June, he offered Gino Chouinard, who was about to hang up his coffee cup, a rather homoerotic and above all jubilant poem, when he could have been content to answer his questions. In other words: with him, a visit to the TV is never anything but a visit to the TV.
Antoine Bertrand did not grow up in an environment where culture was omnipresent. He was 16 when he saw his first play (The renter, by Goldoni, with Sylvie Drapeau).
I came late. I was listening to CKOI and watching movies from Rambo. As it turns out, there is no path.
Antoine Bertrand
What he owes professionally to his parents (a father who was a dog breeder and a mother who worked on a school board) is rather this love of a job well done. Which partly explains the fact that if the thank-you speech at an awards ceremony were an Olympic sport, Antoine Bertrand would be its Gaétan Boucher, his 2014 speech at the Jutra Gala, when he had just buried his mother, remaining a peak in the genre.
Why always give it your all? “Because there are so many people who want to do what we do that the worst insult we can give them is to be jaded, to take it lightly.” He smiles. “And selfishly, it’s also to show myself off.”
PHOTO DOMINICK GRAVEL, THE PRESS
Antoine Bertrand in interview
A voucher deal
Antoine Bertrand has toured extensively in France in recent years (in Tomorrow everything beginswith Omar Sy, in the touching Three times nothing, by Nadège Loiseau, in Little Jesus, by Julien Rigoulot). “It’s important to have the jitters in life. It’s important to be afraid,” he observes about this risk of measuring yourself against the best players in another league.
He has tried in recent years, he says, to quell his “insatiable need to be the center of attention” and “keep a tight rein” on his ego, because there is little uglier than a man to whom life is so generous and who struggles to recognize what some would call privilege.
He has plans to write a novel (“That was the damned Akim Gagnon who put that in my head”) or to make a film. But? “But I always come back to the observation that being an actor who works, like dealit’s pretty hard to beat.”
The Hidden Woman hits theaters on August 9
Three quotes from our interview
About his love for people
“I love the world, I’m like La Poune. We live in society, the opposite must be more painful, because we meet people in life. Unless you’re a multimillionaire and stay in Superman’s fortress of solitude, you’re going to have to interact with people. I go for walks in the Botanical Garden with my boyfriend who has the same schedule as me and sometimes, we come back and I’ve already spoken to 15 people, from 1 minute to 10 minutes. And what I always tell him is “My city is my village.”
About laughter
“It’s the most important thing for me in life, to make my friends laugh. I have no other motivation than that. No, it’s not true. My motivation is to make myself laugh. People wrongly think that I want to make them laugh, but it’s not that important. I want to make myself laugh. It’s part of my lifestyle.”
About a possible platform bringing together all Quebec content
“In a hypothetical solution, I have a hard time imagining that this is not where it goes. I think there is a way that it could become an interesting deal for everyone, including broadcasters. I know that every person I ask if they would subscribe for $14 to a platform with all Quebec content on TV and in cinema, they answer yes. The time is not to separate for the survival of our culture, the time is to regroup.”