The language of wood, he does not know! Actor and director for more than twenty years now, Olivier Marchal is not one to evade difficult questionswhether it concerns his place and his role in French cinema, or his former job in the police, he who spent several years with the Parisian PJ and who likes to use his experience for his films.
But now, as he announced in an interview with our colleagues from Here is this week, there is no longer any question of addressing a subject on which he has spoken a lot in recent months: police violence. Very committed to this difficult societal debate, he had taken defense of his former professiondenying that the problem is as big as some claim.
Lambasting in particular Omar Sy, who had called to demonstrate against police violence in the summer of 2020, he said he had “fed up that sort of second-class actors continue to shit on the cops when they are people who live in privileged neighborhoods and who do privileged jobs“. A position that resembles him but that got him into trouble.
His children in danger?
“It is my children who are threatened with death“, he indeed revealed to the weekly, explaining that the debate had been “very far“. So for Léa (28 years old), Zoé (24 years old and actress like him and his ex-wife Catherine), Ninon (16 years old) and Basile (13 years old), the director of 36 Quai des Goldsmiths decided to keep his opinions to himself…even though he’s still upset.
“So all these pseudo-actors who have started taking positions on things they don’t even know about… There are obviously some bad apples in the policebut in France, we are not at one burr per week, but at one every two years“, he argues in Here is. A little phrase that may still cause controversy at a time when deaths for refusing to comply are exploding…
In any case, the actor recently featured in his thriller series The Crimson Rivers seems to have resigned himself, even if he continues to express his fears for the world of tomorrow: “I let the world go where it’s going, which is not much. And as Simone de Beauvoir said: ‘death seems much less tragic to us when we are tired’. I’m starting to have my ass full. Me, I made my life, I went after my dreams. It’s just that I have children, and I have the chips for them, to project them into this world of motherfuckers. But it’s like that“. Opinions that should not appeal to everyone…