Why Michel Blanc didn’t play in “Santa Claus is trash”

Often associated with the successes of the Splendid troupe, Michel Blanc nevertheless left the band quite early, so as not to get stuck in his flirtatious-loser character.

“We love all your films,” tries to coax the boss of a jewelry store on Place Vendôme robbed by Michel Blanc, who plays his own role in Severe Fatigue. “Above all Santa Claus is trash “, added a hostage, lying on the ground. “I didn’t play in Santa Claus”, retorts the actor, gun in hand. Because Michel Blanc, whose funeral is celebrated on Thursday October 10, is curiously associated with one of the cult films of Splendid where he only makes a brief vocal cameo, the character of the suicidal person who insults Thérèse (played by Anémone) on the standard from SOS Distress friendship.

At the time of writing the play, Michel Blanc and his friends from the café-theater had just filmed Tanned people go skiing (1979). Already at the time, the first cracks between the white clown who lost his hair at 16 and his companions appeared. “It pissed me off that we were writing a sequel to Tanned. I found it vulgar”he confided to Live Cinema Studio, in an interview cited by the CNC website. On the set, he displays a certain detachment from his character, taking instructions only from the director, Patrice Leconte, and not from Clavier, Lhermitte, Chazel and others who worked for weeks and refined each comma of the dialogue. “From the moment I was not a co-author, I felt that I did not have to discuss with my comrades the way of performing my text, but with the director since I was only becoming a simple performing. And the others took it as if I were playing it personally”, he relates to Alexandre Raveleau, who devoted a biography to him entitled On a misunderstanding. Which earned him an explanation with Thierry Lhermitte. Michel Blanc remembers a “toilet atmosphere” on the set, a “Popeye” “very cold, but there was no anger.”

Obviously, the motivation is not good when we have to work on what is still called Santa Claus shot himself in the ass. “We wrote our texts all together, in true collegiality”, he describes to Nikos Aliagas in the show “50’ Inside” on TF1. “But in fact, I am not collective. I think that the dialogues benefit from being written by a single person, because there is a single music.” Quite the opposite of the Splendid school where the writing is collective, with an unwritten rule stipulating that no one takes care of their future character, so as not to favor them over others. “After eight days, I said no,” remembers Michel Blanc in the documentary From tanned people to Santa Claus, the crazy story of the Splendid. “Not that I didn’t think it was good, but I wanted to stand on my own two feet.”

Anyone who entered the popular unconscious with the role of Jean-Claude Dusse already feels that he is being locked into a type of character. “In the first part of the 1980s, I was only offered sub-Dusse roles”he summarizes in his last interview, granted to Paris-Match. “People in the street called me ‘mate’ or shouted ‘you have an opening’, he says. In short, they were talking to Jean-Claude Dusse… It led me towards a career that didn’t interest me. I no longer stimulated the imagination of the authors.” A drama for those who started with Polanski or Tavernier and who revere classics like To Be or Not to Be by Ernst Lubitsch. Not to mention a feeling of disconnect with his partners at Splendid: “We were starting, my friends and I, to no longer really laugh at the same thingssynthesizes the actor in The World in 2018. I was wondering: do I exist or am I one-seventh of the Splendid?”

His participation in the adventure of “Santa Claus” is dotted. On stage, he spent two weeks replacing Gérard Jugnot in the role of Félix. A traumatic experience. “On stage, for example, I could see that I made people laugh less than Gérard Jugnot. When I replaced him in Santa Claus is trash, I followed one thing after another”, he told the magazine First in 2019. In Teleramatwenty years earlier, he even estimated “glaze” people, when Jugnot made them laugh. Hence the role assigned to him in a first version of the scenario: he played a priest collecting the confession of the Jugnot-Chazel killer duo, before denouncing them to the police. The film was to end with a shot of the couple in the dock, instead of the scene of the throwing of gifts at the Vincennes zoo, recalls First.

No regrets for Michel Blanc, whose career takes a turn with Evening wearby Bertrand Blier, in 1986. Until his triumph at the César, in 2012, for his role as chief of staff to a minister in The State Exercise. His speech during the statuette presentation said it all: “I wasn’t sure that the public would accept me in these roles. And so, I thank you for giving me permission to continue in this direction, to continue to be demanding.”