This Saturday, July 9, 2022, France 2 broadcast a new number of Fort Boyard, of which this is the 20th season. It is still Olivier Minne who is at the controls of the famous game, a key figure of the second channel who is also found daily in Everyone has a say with Sidonie Bonnec. So everything is rolling for the 55-year-old host who has built a great career. But Olivier Minne also experienced a crossing of the desert. It was in the early 2000s and the phone no longer rang to offer him work. At that time, he then decided to leave everything to settle in Los Angeles, in the United States. If since then, his career has taken off again, Olivier Minne is still living across the Atlantic.
“I don’t know if that protects me, but when you distance yourself from Paris, you inevitably have a different way of looking at things. I’m not saying that we relativize more, but it allows me not to be too prisoner of what this job can generate as traps or vanity“, he confided during an interview for Gala.
I wasn’t making any more money
Because the “traps or vanity” to which he refers, Olivier Minne knows them well. In 2021, for Europe 1, he explained that the television community had revealed itself “sometimes cruel, and sometimes very violent“.”I have always been suspicious of the light (…) There were times when it was taken away from me and very fortunately, because I had always kept in mind that it could bring misfortune, I did not sink“, rejoiced.
Still, this slump was complicated, especially financially. “I was no longer earning money, could no longer pay my rent and my food, I saw people around me who I thought were friends and who were turning their backs on me“, he still remembered at the microphone of the radio station. So, rebuilding everything in the United States seemed obvious. Especially since in France, he no longer felt well. “I was not a star, I was a little known, but unfortunately for me, enough to be a bit bored in the supermarket or on the streetby people who, without malice, told me ‘We don’t see you anymore’ (…) and it reminded me that I had been abandoned by those who I thought were friends“, he said.