Witches | No babies were harmed during filming

Comments from outraged viewers are piling up on the soap opera’s Facebook page Witches since Tuesday night’s episode aired, where the kidnapped red-haired baby was screaming, crying loudly and being told to “shut up” by his captor.

Here’s a sample: I’m worried about this baby! The little one is really scared! This is abuse, the baby doesn’t understand what’s going on!

And here are other testimonies from outraged people: traumatizing a baby to be on TV, what is that? It’s cruelty, it’s a case of DPJ! It’s totally unhealthy!

These scenes from Witchesburied by the cries of the terrified baby, were uncomfortable to watch, it’s true. Locked in a chalet for several months, nurse Marie-Ève ​​Letendre (Marie-Claude Guérin) and the poor red-haired baby were subjected to the terror regime of psychopathic postman Fred Simard (Maxime Genois), who held them prisoner by threatening to kill them.

In the TVA series, baby Clovis, renamed William by Fred the deranged, was obviously disturbed. And he was bawling non-stop.

“He’s annoying,” raged the bearded Fred, armed with a shotgun. “Shut your mouth,” Fred then spat at the baby, who was in a fit. “He’s not going to do it again, tell him to shut his mouth,” Fred yelled at Marie-Ève, who was handcuffed to the banister.

Fanny Lagacé was heartbroken when she read the messages on Facebook that practically accused her of mistreating her baby for the needs of a television show. Because Fanny Lagacé is the mother of Jacob Langlois, 18 months, who plays the red-headed baby in Witches since the first episode of the soap opera, broadcast in September 2023 on TVA.

And no, her little Jacob Langlois was not mistreated under the direction of director Sarah Pellerin. “The production team organized everything so that my baby would be okay. In most of the violent scenes, my baby is separated from the actors. He’s not in the same room as them,” recalls Fanny Lagacé, who was there last spring when these very tough sequences were recorded in a chalet located in Varennes, on the South Shore.

It should be noted that the Union of Artists (UDA) strictly regulates the work of actors under 2 years old. For example, a baby does not shoot for more than 20 consecutive minutes and always follows with a 15-minute break. In total, the working day of a toddler under 2 years old never exceeds four hours. And as for other actors, the baby has a dressing room to rest.

“If the baby is not doing well, we stop filming. Maybe that day, Jacob had more separation anxiety, just like when I drop him off at daycare. It was Jacob’s first day of filming in six months. My baby is a normal baby who cries when he’s not happy. He hasn’t been confronted with violence. We organize ourselves so that it remains fun and a game for him,” explains Jacob’s mother, Fanny Lagacé.

Of course, recordings of the red-haired baby’s cries were added during the editing stage, which made this episode of Witches even more intense and poignant. Little Jacob does not appear physically in all the shots and, very often, the production replaces him with a doll.

“In the worst moments of violence in this episode, the baby was not there,” confides a source who was on the set during these difficult scenes, but who is not authorized by TVA to speak publicly.

Angry reactions to the red-haired baby Witchs resemble those, just as epidermal, generated by the episodes of the tortured dogs in With beating heart, last fall.

It’s not so much that viewers confuse reality with fiction, as when Donalda was given pots of molasses on Radio-Canada, but that they can’t bear to witness the suffering of vulnerable and defenseless beings.

In this anxiety-provoking and charged episode Witchesthe kidnapper-mailman Fred Simard did not beat the red-haired baby. He never shook or tossed him. On the other hand, he yelled at him, which triggered the baby to cry louder, which further enraged the kidnapper-mailman, and the noise level continued to increase for several minutes.

It is this escalation of noise and tension, behind closed doors, that quickly became cacophonous and intolerable. Imagine: a baby screaming, alone in his playpen, and that no one consoles, it gets to us in the guts, even in a fictional situation.

This popular grumbling is also part of the very rough life journey of this red-haired baby, who was abandoned at birth and left at the foot of the falls in the fictional village of Sainte-Piété. After his adoption, the red-haired baby was stolen from his cradle, then locked up in a chalet deep in the woods.

I mean, poor little heart! Let him go, he didn’t ask for it! He’s a cute and charming little guy who doesn’t deserve such punishment! (Editor’s note: This is fiction, calm down, Hugo.)