Just Between You and Me | Gildor Roy Believes in a Promised Land

Like Bruce Springsteen in The Promised LandGildor Roy believes in a promised land. What does it look like? A film set or a stage. “There is no place on the planet where I am happier than when I am acting,” he swears. “I am very happy with my family, very happy with my children, but now, I know that I am in my place, that this is what I was meant to do in life. It fills me with happiness.”

Gildor Roy has known the euphoric intoxication of this promised land since one evening when he was 13, when, under the direction of a young director by the name of Marc Labrèche, he was going to take to the stage, that of their college, for the first time.

“If I do this job, it’s thanks to Marc Labrèche and his father Gaétan,” confides the man who believes that a good interview is one during which “you remove all the bullshit from showbusiness.” Mission accepted by your journalist.

But at the restaurant, after the performance, while Gildor was eating with his family and Marc with his, there was no sign of Gaétan. So much so that the teenager was already thinking about another career.

“I really said to myself: ‘Well, I’m going to do something else.’ And at one point, I saw Mr. Labrèche hit his forehead, as if to remember that he had to talk to me. He got up and came to tell me [Gildor imite son grasseyement] : “I think you’re an actor.” If he hadn’t told me that, I probably wouldn’t be an actor.”

Thanks to Dédé

At 64, Gildor Roy is perhaps more of an actor than ever, as he plays the title role in Luc Dionne’s new series, Dumasenough to delight the telephages, but sadden those who, including the tearful author of these lines, hoped that the end of District 31 allow him to get back into country, which he had promised. Another hotel room (1994), his tasty second album, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.^e birthday. “I’m like Michel Pagliaro,” he says, laughing at his procrastination.

It is, in a way, thanks to the late André Gagnon that Gildor Roy one day took a detour through song, while his young acting career was already in the saddle. One New Year’s Eve, at the pianist’s, the big guy finds himself next to the big little man, in the music room.

Louise Latraverse, who was there, because Louise Latraverse is always in the right place at the right time, will invite Gildor in the following months to participate in the show. Stars for a nightwhich will lead to a Sunday country residency at the Théâtre La Licorne, then to a record contract.

Unlike many others who put on the Stetson ironically, this parallel life was not a costume for him, much less an imposture. Country is a family language for the Roys. At the farm on Chemin du Petit-Brûlé, in Rigaud, Gildor and his siblings organized a corn roast every summer that looked like a festival.

“We didn’t have a lot of relatives around, so we were bored,” says the native of Cadillac (now a neighbourhood in Rouyn-Noranda), who left Abitibi at the age of 4. “We had built a stage in the barn, a dance floor, we had hung spotlights. We had mowed part of the field and people camped there.”

With his cousins, his uncles and his aunts, little Gildor put together, during this weekend, ephemeral groups that drew from the repertoire of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. His music school was this annual party, which welcomed up to 325 people. “It came down from Lake Superior, from northern Ontario, from Abitibi. It was like a country Woodstock.”

“I understand why you do this.”

Gildor Roy also often sang with his father, Gildor senior. Their classic? There’s a Tear in My Beerby Hank Williams (him again).

Gildor Roy keeps this late father alive through several of his characters, including Commander Chiasson, inspired by the righteousness of a man for whom an agreement was an agreement. Example? In sixth grade, his father promised to buy him a bike if he got 90% in math and French. His results? 90% in math, and 89.7% in French. Ish. Conclusion: “I didn’t get my bike, I wanted to kill him, but he was right.”

A man from another era, who had had to get his hands dirty from childhood working in mines and on the log logging, Gildor Roy’s father dreamed of something more stable than showbiz for his offspring.

The law, for example. It often happened that the son would enter his room and discover newspaper cuttings reporting the high percentage of UDA members living below the poverty line.

That was until one night at the Spectrum, Gildor invited Gildor to come sing with him, which would provoke a standing ovation, even before the first note. An unforgettable moment.

“I saw my dad looking around the room and freaking out. He came up next to me and in my ear, he said, ‘Now I understand why you’re doing this.'”

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