Eric Antoine is one of M6’s emblematic presenters. The chain entrusted him with the reins of Lego Masters, The Traitors Where Who can beat us? And every Tuesday, it’s in the jury d‘Incredible talent 2022, alongside Hélène Ségara, Sugar Sammy and Marianne James that we can find the 46-year-old magician and humorist. On this occasion, he was honored in the magazine TV 7 Days of October 3. He notably mentioned his mother who left too soon.
After the baccalaureate, Eric Antoine studied medicine. But very quickly, his passion for magic caught up with him. He did everything to make a career in the industry, despite the little reluctance of his mother. “My mother, who died too soon, was worried about this artistic choice and would have preferred that I continue my studies, rather than doing magic tricks in bars and weddings, but, paradoxically, it was she who pushed me to do theatre. As for my father, he was completely absent and died when I was 19.“, did he declare.
Eric Antoine finally did well to follow his dreams since his career exploded in 2006 after his stint in Amazing talent. “The hardest thing for me was school. It took me ten years to unlearn what I had learned there and to become myself. The theater helped me a lot to be different, not to fall into line. I also suffered criticism from other artists who told me that humor did not work with magic and vice versa. But if you’re criticized, that’s usually a good sign. It means you are where no one has gone before“, he continued.
A secret kept until the end
Calista’s husband had already confided in the death of his mother, to whom he was so close. In 2018, at France Info, he had recalled that she was a psychotherapist and that when he was young, he loved to spy on his conversations with his patients. This taught him the value of listening and exchanging. “To be loved by a parent is already fantastic, but above all to be loved as we want to be, by being free. That’s what my mother passed on to me: a loving gaze, loving listening, attention and gentleness… Forgiveness too. It was she who passed on this way of loving to me, and it gave me a lot of strength.“, he confided when discussing their complicity. But in 2008, life tore his pillar away from him. She died of cancer, a disease that she had hidden from him until her last breath. “I resented him, yes and no. I found that it was still an absolute greatness, to leave the planet without seeking to be regretted. (…) People who feel that they are going to die sometimes enter into a kind of redemption: it is the moment when everyone has to love us and when we become nice again, when we have been a bitch all his life. This last-minute search for love is a way of gaining power over people. And she preferred to open her hands even more when she saw death approaching“, he specified.