Charlotte de Turckheim is on the bill for the film “Cracked”

Every day, a personality invites themselves into the world of Élodie Suigo. Monday, September 2, 2024: actress and director Charlotte de Turckheim. Since Wednesday, August 28, she has been starring in the film “Fêlés” by Christophe Duthuron, alongside Bernard Lecoq and Pierre Richard.

As an actress, for Charlotte de Turckheim, there was initially the stage and a wonderful encounter with Coluche who wrote and produced her first solo show. The encounter with the public took place on stage thanks to A day at my mother’sher first one-woman show, and then in the cinema, with roles in comedy The Cruise by Pascale Pouzadoux (2011) or even Mistral warning by Roselyne Bosch with Jean Reno.

Since Wednesday, August 28, she has been starring in the film Cracked by Christophe Duthuron, alongside Bernard Lecoq and Pierre Richard. Based on a true story, “The Cracked” are members of the Foyer Arc-en-ciel, an associative place in Marmande, in Lot-et-Garonne. They are psychologically fragile, but not sick enough to be taken care of by an institution, nor able-bodied enough to face society alone.

franceinfo: Isn’t this film first and foremost a film of hope?

Charlotte of Turckheim: What I find really wonderful about this film is that it’s not just the cracked people that we’re looking at as if we were observers. We’re all concerned. It’s important to be able to say to ourselves: “Well, if one day I experience an episode where things aren’t going well, I will be understood, I will be taken care of, I will be accompanied.“. Afterwards, we have to be careful because people who have real, very intense and serious psychiatric illnesses need to be treated differently.

There is a generational transmission through this film. I have the impression that it still echoes a lot with your own story. The fact of having people who are from different socio-professional or socio-cultural categories and who end up meeting.

That’s the world of entertainment. My neighbors and friends are Jamel Debbouze and Mélissa Theuriau. How do you expect me, coming from the 16th arrondissement, to meet Jamel who lived in Trappes? I think that’s really the strength of our profession, these exchanges, the fact that we’re not in judgment, that we’re all ultimately dissidents from our own background to find ourselves in a kind of big melting pot of people who come from different worlds.

I wondered what made you want to become an actress.

“I mainly wanted to escape the life that was mapped out for me and do more adventurous, funnier things.”

Charlotte of Turckheim

to franceinfo

I didn’t set out to do that at all. It was when I went to see a friend who was in a drama class, at the Cours Simon. Rosine Margat, who was the director of this school, perhaps seeing me come almost every day, asked me: “What are you doing here? Do you want to be an actress?“No, I don’t want to be an actress! She said to me: “Come up on stage and tell me this fable by La Fontaine“. I read it and she said to me: “Well listen, you’re right not to want to be an actress because you’re as boring as a nightcap.“. I think she said that on purpose to tease me. I came down from the stage and I thought to myself: “Boring as a nightcap, me, she’ll see what she’ll see!” Obviously, after that I did another scene. I can’t even tell you that I made the decision, it just happened, day by day and three years later, we put together a troupe, etc.

Love and family have always been at the heart of your life. Your father is affected by May 68. He is 40 years old, he divorces and leaves for Afghanistan with his new wife. Then returns home.

And as luck would have it, at 50, I married an Afghan anyway! In fact, my father, after having raised us in an extremely conventional, classical and bourgeois way, from one day to the next, he told us: “No, I was wrong, do what you want, go, live and become and we emancipate ourselves. And besides, I’m leaving with my mistress“. So he puts bandanas in his hair, pink jackets and he goes to Afghanistan. At the same time, it’s very complicated to manage for us because we are completely destabilized and at the same time, it’s an incredible opening to the world because he tells us: “Go live your life and let’s not be afraid of others, let’s not be afraid of strangers“And it was an extraordinary lesson in openness.

Cracked, also talks about loneliness. Isn’t that the film’s greatest strength?

Isolation is terrifying. You can feel it yourself.

“When we go through difficult times, we all tend to withdraw. When someone comes to get you, when someone reaches out to you, you immediately realize that it feels good.”

Charlotte of Turckheim

to franceinfo

There is a special love for theatre, for going on stage.

If there is one thing, it is theatre. Well, it is more precise than that, it is making people laugh. For me, it is an intense happiness when I see people slapping their thighs, laughing, coming to see me afterwards and saying: “Oh, I’m having a bad time right now, but I had a laugh“I don’t know what I have with making people laugh, but even in my family, with my daughters, it’s a kind of irrepressible need to act the clown, to act the fool, to transform sadness into joy, drama into laughter. I don’t know why I have that in me, it’s a gift from heaven, I think. It really is a gift.