Podcast Just between you and me | With Anne Dorval, it’s all or nothing

In Just between you and me, journalist Dominic Tardif boasts a great luxury, that of time. Always somewhere between laughter and emotion, between rich reflection and wild anecdotes, these interviews are opportunities allowing media and cultural personalities to follow through on their thoughts.

Trumpet, French horn, trombone, transverse flute, oboe, clarinet. As a child, Anne Dorval touched, briefly, all the instruments. “What have I tried too?” Oh yes, later, I took drum lessons! » This will not be our only surprise.

Anne Dorval, drummer? It was at the time when she was studying at the Montreal Conservatory of Dramatic Art. The great American drummer Peter Magadini (Al Jarreau, Diana Ross), passing through Montreal, had fallen madly in love with one of his classmates and faced with the meager contracts that the local jazz scene had to offer him, was set to give lessons. Among his students, there was Anne Dorval, for whom taming drums and cymbals had always been a dream.

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“But my problem is that I want to do everything perfectly, I’m not interested in being a drummer,” explains the actress during this interview, as flamboyant as it is introspective, Anne Dorval is one of those rare people capable of sliding from a rather difficult reflection on her relationship with death to a lighter confidence about her desire to share her daily life with a dog, prevented by her allergies.

Unable to become queen of drum in a few lessons, she will therefore abandon her drumsticks, as she had abandoned the piano, because she was ordered to work on her scales, while she wanted to play Chopin, straight away.

“As long as we want to surpass ourselves, let’s start now”: this is her credo, a sentence which certainly testifies to an undeniable intransigence towards herself, even a certain extremism with which she has imbued several of her characters , from the mother of I killed my mother to the Crockwell twins of Heart has its reasons.

But there is also constantly in Anne Dorval, as in the antechamber of her smile, the awareness of the fragility of everything. As long as we’re pushing ourselves, let’s start now, because everything could stop tomorrow.

Self-deprecating salvation

“I live intensely, I’m an intense person,” she admits, a sentence the reading of which probably won’t make you fall out of your chair or spit out your coffee. “But I am also able to have a certain perspective, I am able to laugh about it. I have a great, great, great sense of self-deprecation, it has saved me from many things. »

What does she have in common with her character Diane in Mommy, who could seem at odds with the refinement that emanates from her? “I think she’s a fighter and I’m a fighter too,” she says, suddenly more serious. “There are pivotal moments in our lives that change the course of things, that mean that we are no longer the same person. You have to deal with it, mourn certain things. »

Anne Dorval is in the second category.

Develop your empathy

Do you want to shake Anne Dorval off her hinges? Tell him that actors are professional liars, quite simply because they are called upon to put on different faces, when in reality they are hunters of the truth.

In Leave the nightthe very gripping first film by Belgian director Delphine Girard on the very delicate subject of rape, the Quebecer plays the mother of an attacker, a role that she will have considered in the same way as all the others: with the most of possible empathy.

“I don’t like people who are self-centered,” she says, remembering the discomfort that overwhelmed her when friends, at youth parties, had pizzas delivered to the neighbor’s house, just for a laugh. , without regard for others. You will have understood: Anne Dorval’s brain sometimes takes fabulous detours.

“That doesn’t mean that I don’t have my moments of egocentrism,” she adds, probably always afraid of ignoring her own failings.

Making peace with death

And empathy towards herself? Anne Dorval manages to have more than before. “I think so,” she replies, “but I like to bury my head in the sand. I look at myself in the mirror less and less, it breaks me too much. At 40, I cried, I said to myself: “That’s it, this is the beginning of the end.” I saw it in my skin. Imagine now! I look at my skin and I break down, I just want to cry. That’s why it’s so hard to do this job when you get older. »

And her fear of death, a subject she has often spoken about, but which it was impossible to get around, because it is one of your journalist’s favorites, Anne is healing herself little by little.

“We have to make peace with that,” she says, in the tone of someone who is perhaps still trying to convince herself a little. “It’s wasted time, it’s just anxiety, it’s just sleepless nights. We have to transform that into something else. It’s wasted energy otherwise. »

Leave the night hits the screens on March 8.