“You are ruining the image” was said to Jean Reno during the filming of the film “La Rafle”

The actor, Jean Reno, is the exceptional guest of Le Monde d’Élodie from February 12 to 16, 2024. He traces the thread of his career around five of his most emblematic films. Since Wednesday February 14, he is starring in Claude Zidi Jr.’s film “Retirement Home 2”, alongside Kev Adams and Daniel Prévost.

Jean Reno agreed to spend this whole week in Le Monde d’Élodie on franceinfo. The opportunity to take stock of this journey of multiple collaborations with the greatest actors and directors. Having become an essential actor, the Franco-Catalan born in Casablanca is one of the few to have succeeded in developing a career that has crossed borders.

His meeting with the French was obviously marked by the role of Enzo Molinari in The big Blue (1988) by Luc Besson. In this journey which commands respect, he has managed to touch on all registers, comedies, thrillers and even dramas: Nikita (1990) and Leon (1994) by Luc Besson, The Crimson Rivers by Mathieu Kassovitz in 2000, Operation Corned Beef by Jean-Marie-Poiré (1991), Godzilla by Roland Emmerich (1998), The pink Panther by Shawn Levy (2006) or even The Roundup by Roselyne Bosch (2010). With his personality, he became the protector, the uncle of the family, the one who is both funny and authoritarian. The father too, the man of confidence, the one to whom we entrust things and the one behind whom we stand for advice.

Since Wednesday February 14, he is starring in the film with Kev Adams and Daniel Prévost: Retirement home 2 by Claude Zidi Jr.

franceinfo: Even if you are labeled an actor, have at times, the roles you have played ultimately spilled over into your life as a man and vice versa?

Jean Reno : It’s afterwards, when we come home, once the work is finished. I don’t realize it, but it horrifies my wife because it will take between two and three weeks to empty this cupboard. With the movie The roundup, the moment when the wagon door closed, when we were all crowded together to leave for the camp, since I play a doctor who refuses to stay and who leaves with the children, that moment was a horror. I think Mélanie Laurent had shingles. I gained three or four kilos because I was eating, I was drinking. It’s unbearable.

It is a horror to go and scratch this wound that Nazism created. And it costs you because you know that you are touching the core of non-love. Send children to be gassed, but that’s not possible!”

Currently, bubbles of filth, of hatred, are rising against people who simply live, who have done nothing other than live in a religion, perhaps which is not yours. But what do you want to do about it? Well, there are people who say: “We must exterminate, we must cut off arms“…They removed teeth, took hair to make mattresses or blankets. But what are we talking about?

Lampshades with skin.

Yes ! Monsters. And you carry it within you. It is not easy. We actually went to shoot where Spielberg’s film was shot because they kept the camp. They came there, it was cold, there was snow and you see everything, all the images, you understand everything because you are in it. You can’t play it if you’re not into it. And Simone Veil told me: “I didn’t think you could do it“. She saw the film and I said to her: thank you, thank you. Yes, it’s funny because you break the image. Once again, we move the image and I was very happy with that.

“I am not what I do, but I am somewhat what I do.”

What is surprising with this film, which is a really very particular film in your filmography, is that for the first time, you talk about a subject with “an implication” in some way. That is to say that until then, you had played roles, it was fiction. There, we have a Jean Reno who is ultimately inhabited, absorbed, nourished by that. It’s another side of you that we’ve discovered and we understand that it has also changed you as a man.

Yes, we are gaining surface area. Sometimes we go up, we gain height. It can be philosophy, it can be something that rises to the top, but that’s the surface. It’s the surface area since you preserve the flesh, you increase it. You think of people who eat so as not to see their loneliness, you gain on that side rather than the height, where you can be very skinny and go towards Buddhism or things like that. This is the surface. It’s not a Buddhist role, it’s a human role, flesh, meat. Hold on, hold on because you can’t think that humanity does this. It’s impossible.