Isabelle Nanty is an actress, director, director and was for a time a drama teacher. When we mention his name, we think of the films: Visitors, Aunty Danielle, the fabulous destiny of Amelie Poulain, Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, The Tuche, but also to series like Do not do this, do not do that or Munch. Today, the fourth part of “Tuche“by Olivier Baroux with Jean-Paul Rouve, Michel Blanc, Claire Nadeau.
franceinfo: In The Tuche 4, we are far from the 100 million euros that were won by Jeff Tuche ten years ago.
Isabelle Nanty: I will take this opportunity to say that I find that the Française des Jeux should not give 134 million euros to a person. It would be so good if there were 134 people who already have a million euros! I find it crazy to earn such a sum. It’s no use. Of the 100 million euros of Tuche, I think they ate a bit, gave a lot and it didn’t actually change anything. They stay the same. They age like us who play them. It is really a pleasure to meet again. The Tuche is the kif in fact, we should change the word ‘Kif’ to ‘Tuche’.
The Tuches are little children. They have the candor, the enthusiasm, the greed to express their love and to pass it on. They haven’t moved. They are the same.
Isabelle Nantyto franceinfo
What is crazy are these family values. We see them in your eyes, whether yours or Jeff Tuche’s, we have the feeling that you have become adults, but that you have kept your childish eyes.
This is the key. What also helps us a lot is that we play with our original accents, the accent of our youth and that immediately puts us back in this state of candor, of non-judgment. We were unfiltered, we were free and it’s good for the adults we have become to go back to that childhood.
There are also all your family values in The Tuche. Dad, lumberjack, stay-at-home mom. What did your parents pass on to you?
Respect, I believe. My mother was Protestant, so a kind of sense of authenticity, not to be ‘like’. And then frankly in life, achieving consistency is not easy. I think it may take a lifetime to be totally consistent.
It’s complicated to be an actress, to do a job where you invent something anyway, by being authentic, to make it as real as possible.
Isabelle Nantyto franceinfo
We also feel that you have lived through somewhat difficult times.
It happened to me, it didn’t damage me. The beating made me more tender, I think, like meat! The meat that is tenderized with blows. I’m always surprised when people get tough even more when luck ends up smiling. It’s weird.
What is astonishing is that this profession, this career are real victories over life. When you were little you used to have dyslexia and at that time you weren’t really treating it, it had become a bit of a shame.
And besides, I was dyscalculia, that is to say that when you talk to me about numbers, I will panic. That’s why I often gave appointments on 10 to 10 a.m., 11 to 11 a.m., 12 to 12 p.m. We weren’t told what it was. I went to a speech therapist. Me, I dreamed of being an actress, I dreamed of expressing, of transforming my pains, but in fact, when you are dyslexic and an actress, it’s not so easy to take an accessory, to walk at the same time and to say its text and to think of all the indications which were told to us.
What then makes you successful?
I have little tips. I made strategies for myself, as they say, but I always have the feeling of not succeeding. In fact, it is the relaxation and the non-control, finally the forgetting that makes it happen. And when the director says to me: “This is good, I have it“I have absolutely no recollection of what I did. So I’m still unsatisfied.
I have the impression that thanks to the troupe La Foliole who played The bald singer by Eugène Ionesco, you came out of the abstract, that you got into the concrete of your life, of what you really wanted to do.
It is precisely the feeling of being alive. Jean-François Schaaff, the director of the troupe, is the first to have looked at me, as did later Francis Huster, Jacques Weber, Alain Resnais, Étienne Chatiliez, Alain Chabat, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Pierre -François Martin-Laval, Edouard Baer, who were people who just looked at me, who let me be carried by their gazes.
It’s magic a look, it gives a strength. It reveals you and that is what is beautiful in our profession.
Isabelle Nantyto franceinfo
I did a little as I was told because I am polite, but thanks to my politeness, perhaps to what my parents instilled in me, I did not miss things. Gad Elmaleh, it was he who came to ask me to direct him, Julie Ferrier too. They are the ones who saved me. They are the ones who made my life. It’s all the people I met who made my life.
I was wondering what this profession of actress had brought you …
I don’t really differentiate between my way of life and the way I live the job. What I love is life and people, and I am very happy.