The series will be broadcast on Netflix in September 2023. It tells the career of the former boss of Olympique de Marseille, from his beginnings in the 1970s until his imprisonment in 1997.
It is a likeable and thunderous Bernard Tapie brilliantly played by Laurent Lafitte in the series carpet. The first two episodes premiered on Sunday April 16 at the CanneSeries festival. The miniseries, in seven episodes, will be released on Netflix in September 2023.
>> Five things to know about the Netflix series “Tapie” presented for the first time at Canneseries
If it will tell the career of the former boss of Olympique de Marseille in the years 1980-1990 until his imprisonment in 1997, these first two episodes are first tinged with nostalgia for the 1970s. “I have the impression that this is the balance that we wanteddeclares Laurent Laffite who discovered the episodes in Cannes. We find Bernard Tapie and, at the same time, I don’t disappear into the character, like the performances that the Anglo-Saxons do a little more, where they completely disappear into the character.”
To embody Bernard Tapie, Laurent Lafitte assures him moreover: he did not want to meet the businessman. “I didn’t feel the need for it in my work as an actorhe explains to franceinfo. It would have amused me to meet him now. He always intrigued me. I watched it quite a bit and afterwards, Tristan Séguéla (director) helped me to balance his way of speaking and his gestures, in particular the amplitude and how to occupy space, how not to be afraid of touching others… All his ‘physicality’ in a relationship of seduction and power who is permanent with this man.”
“From the president’s office to the OM locker room”
After the 1970s, the following episodes will tell 30 years of the career of François Mitterrand’s former minister. “There is this thirst for success and wealthdescribes director Tristan Séguéla, which means that with Bernard Tapie, we walk in very different places. Obviously, the series will take us to the office of the President of the Republic, to the locker rooms of OM, in the middle of football stadiums, etc. And until his time in prison.
One question remains: does the series rehabilitate Bernard Tapie, who died of cancer on October 3, 2021? “I don’t feel like he needed it, and I don’t feel like I’m rehabilitating him because the show shows him with all his contradictions and there are questions that are going to be left unanswered“, explains the actor. Laurent Lafitte was so involved in this role that it is he who interprets for the series one of the first 45 turns of Bernard “Tapy”, at the timewith a y”to look american“.
