Sara Giraudeau is an actress. Nourished artistically and humanly by the sensitivity of her parents, Annie Duperey and Bernard Giraudeau, it was the theater that revealed her to the public with The Vagina Monologues (2005), but also Twelfth Night of Shakespeare (2009) or even Dove by Jean Anouilh in 2012. And then there was the springboard and recognition with The Waltz of the Penguinsa musical which earned her the Molière for theatrical revelation and the Raimu prize for Revelation in 2007. But who says Sara Giraudeau also says The Office of Legendsa series for television, and the film little peasant for the cinema in 2017, which earned her a César award for best actress in a supporting role.
This Wednesday, September 28, 2022, she is showing the film The sixth child by Leopold Legrand. It is the story of two couples who meet through or because of rather dramatic circumstances. The first couple, Franck and Meriem, have five children, a sixth is on the way. They hardly live in a caravan. The second couple formed by Julien and Anna, whom she plays, are lawyers and cannot have children.
franceinfo: From this meeting will be born a child, of course, but above all a completely unthinkable arrangement, but which in the end we understand, even that we authorize at times…
Sarah Giraudeau: Yes, an arrangement that is pretty crazy. That’s what I love about this character of Anna who, at some point, will go beyond the limits. With Meriem, they will create a kind of duo of mothers. But it’s so much for the good of the child who will be born that indeed, at some point, we say to ourselves that they are right!
The couple who decides to “share” this child lives in poverty in a caravan, it’s not easy, but at the same time they don’t lack love for their children. There is a transmission story that is quite incredible… What did your parents give you?
My mother, I think the most important thing she passed on to me was confidence. There was something of a great freedom in my evolution, therefore also a loneliness in many places. She was an orphan, somewhere she did not have the weapons to accompany me at all levels, on many things. And at the same time, it’s good. I think that a child, when he evolves and he feels very alone in certain evolutions, he builds a secret garden, he builds cracks which help him to build himself, but associated with a real mother’s confidence, a cocoon, to the love she has. And that, I can never thank her enough. And then my dad was less there, more impatient.
“When my father was there, things had to happen, he had to teach us a lot of things, that things move, that things flow. So, as a child, it was a little more chaotic. “
Sara Giraudeauat franceinfo
The scene allowed you to build yourself too. I have the impression that you need to nourish yourself constantly.
Yes, and in any case to have roles that are very enduring. They were very tough roles. When I think of Viola in Twelfth Night, there is a cross-dressing, so there is a game. But these are roles that suffer. With the loss of her twin, she’s always going to be in a battle to try. So these are always characters who are in search. The Lark, it’s the same, she was a little Joan of Arc, apparently frail and fragile, who all of a sudden is going to make an incredible journey. So there are men and women in these characters!
Does it define you or not?
Yes, yes, anyway.
Fragile in appearance, but very strong inside?
Yes.
There have been The Office of Legends in 2015…
The Office of Legends upset a state of being that I had at the cinema. I really thought I was going to quit… There was something in the cinema that I didn’t understand, either a part of me that I hadn’t explored, or an enormous contradiction between an exterior and an interior which means that, in the image, what you bring out is almost more important, preventing us from also seeing what is inside. And afterwards, the personalities that can be a bit contradictory are also difficult to pin down. I realized that. A small voice, a slightly fragile side and no, that can’t play it all! With The Office of Legends and little peasantthere is something that opened up and that allowed this “personality” to be able to fit into very different roles in the end, whereas at the start, it was very tight.
In The sixth child, precisely, the character is very dense. What does this role ultimately represent?
Each project brings an additional stone to the work of a personality. And so me, the little question I had with Anna is that she’s a woman… I like mysterious characters, I like when there’s always a form of mystery in a character . And there, Anna will go into lies and pretense and that, any character who goes into this can no longer be understood. And I wanted us to continue to understand it. So it’s been to balance things between being part mystery, but still approachable and understandable.