Gérard Depardieu is everywhere. He made a name for himself in cinemas with three films in three weeks: Retirement home by Thomas Gillou (currently in theaters), Maigret by Patrice Leconte (released February 23) and Robuste by Constance Meyer (March 2). It is in the context of this overloaded news that The Sunday newspaper went to meet the iconic 73-year-old actor who said he only wanted to talk about cinema.
THROUGHOUT the interview, the subject of death is broached, after a parallel between Maigret who lost his daughter and Gérard Depardieu who lost his son Guillaume. The latter – born of the love story between Gérard Depardieu and Élisabeth Guignot – died on October 13, 2008 after contracting pneumonia and a new infection due to staphylococcus aureus, resistant to methicillin, during the filming of The Childhood of Icarus of Alex Iordăchescu in Romania. For Gérard Depardieu, having lost his son did not help him to put himself in Maigret’s shoes, for the simple and good reason that he never considered himself in mourning. “I don’t know mourning: my son Guillaume is in me, as are Jean Carmet, Maurice Pialat, François Truffaut or Barbaraimmediately answers the one who has just arrived on Instagram. If absence weighs us down, it is because of the void it leaves. I make sure to fill it in by saying that Guillaume would have liked such and such a thing.“
Life always ends horizontally
As to whether Gérard Depardieu fears death, the answer is no. The actor believed so many times that his last hour had arrived that it does not scare him. However, he wants his departure to be peaceful, painless. “It’s no worse to die in your sleep, like Michel Galabru. Death doesn’t worry me, life always ends horizontally. What is difficult is what happens before: the suffering, the agony, the impotence of medicine, confides the great name of French cinema, described as a man constantly in turmoil. After “road accidents” and “the comas“of which he was a victim in his life, Gérard Depardieu believes he is already dead”Many times“.”Even some drunks I’ve taken have made me die! That’s why I stopped“, he explains.
Indeed, Gérard Depardieu has multiplied accidents on two wheels. In 1998, while he was on the set ofAsterix and Obelix versus Caesar on a motorbike, and drunk, he had fallen. In 2012, he was hit by a car while riding a scooter. In 2000, he underwent a quintuple coronary bypass. So many hazards that have not weakened him since he has shot nine films in the past two years.