Nichole, pronounced with the English accent, please, is a voluble and colorful character with a blurred gender identity. Nichole is also, and above all, the star of the comical documentary from Télé-Québec which bears her name and which earned her honors, and the selection, of the queer cinema and culture festival Image+Nation. Self-proclaimed “rising star”, precisely thirty minutes from musical success according to her best friend Manu, Nichole opens wide the door to her daily life punctuated by her desire for fame and shows us behind the scenes, in the hollow of her intimacy. glittery.
“Nichole’s quest is not about her gender identity, but about success and dreams. And it is inclusive and universal,” explains the screenwriter and co-director of the web series, Guenièvre Sandré. In the midst of a Quebec audiovisual landscape that still and always favors heteronormative protagonists to tell common stories, it was important to him to highlight a character of diversity. The actor Alexandre Lavigne, who plays Nichole on the screen, rarely felt so close to a role in this regard. “Of course, I wear a wig, make-up and costumes, but I identify with the essence of the character who works hard to reach his goal and succeed,” he says. If, at first glance, one might believe in a composition role, the incarnation of this character, in reality, required little inner transformation, because Nichole and he are “deeply connected to [leur] truth “.
How do you build a genderless character?
Even more, Alexandre Lavigne saw himself freed from any constraint in his non-gendered interpretation of Nichole. “To have a blank canvas given by the realization was for me the greatest freedom”, says the one who makes the relationship to the genre his hobbyhorse. “There is often something in the performance when you know that your character is supposed to be a woman or a man,” he points out. According to him, in 2022, it is now time to “shuffle the cards” in order to open up diversity to all stories and to finally have a cultural universe in tune with “real life”. “We have to dare and offer these roles to both the actors and the public. Everyone is ready,” says the artist.
To have a blank canvas given by the director was the greatest freedom for me. Something often colors the performance when we know that our character is supposed to be a woman or a man.
From a practical point of view, the documenter’s writing Nichole was for its part a real game of patience when you know that the French language is extremely gendered. “We struggled at times, but we made it! enthuses Guinevere Sandré. And his co-director and producer Gabriel Savignac to specify: “During the creation, we decided not to include the genre of Nichole in the description of the character. So we removed all gendered pronouns and adjectives from the script to leave no clues. »
“We really wanted to break the ubiquitous gendered language on television,” continues Gabriel Savignac. To counter it in their own way, the directing duo also gave a large place to the improvisation that the cast – notably completed by the formidable Patrick Emmanuel Abellard, Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, François Ruel-Côté and Brigitte Tremblay – had the artistic intelligence to execute by integrating these notions and elements of language. As a result, the spectator has the possibility of appropriating the character as he sees fit.
Céline, inspiring idol of millennials
The public can also take hold of Nichole thanks to her multiple affinities with Celine Dion, “our Quebec reference par excellence for success”, believes Gabriel Savignac. “Our generation, the millennials, are very admiring of Céline,” he adds. Fans of the interpreter of For you to love me again can, for example, recognize in the documenter several nods to programs devoted to Celine Dion at the turn of the 2000s. Evidenced by this famous scene with the otolaryngologist influenced by an interview given by the diva to the era. “Nichole also has the same impeccable work ethic as Céline, which is 90% hard work and 10% talent,” adds Guenièvre Sandré. And because Celine Dion has always insisted that she would never have succeeded without her dream teamthe same goes for Nichole, who “can rely on the unconditional support and love of her loved ones and her network”, underlines the screenwriter and co-director.
Finally, the burlesque tone, and just as bombastic as Celine Dion, who makes Nichole a delightfully entertaining web series, also finds its origins in other shows that emerged in the early 2000s. The Ashlee Simpson Show, Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, american idoletc., and by the reports at the Flash of TQS, when we followed a personality for a day and she presented us with her favorite places in Montreal,” says Guenièvre Sandré. With such a realistic result, we would almost forget that the character of Nichole is only a fiction…