Tapie: Does Laurent Lafitte wear a wig in the series?

In Tapiethe Netflix event mini-series, Laurent Lafitte, member of the Comédie Française, lends his features to Bernard Tapie. Over the course of seven episodes, the actor who had started in Model class, portrays the entrepreneur, politician and former president of OM, from his beginnings as a salesman, then singer in the 1960s, through his multiple businesses and company buyouts, until his incarceration at Health in 1997 for corruption. For his performance, Laurent Lafitte preferred evocation to mimicry, delivering his “version of Tapie”. Work that required two and a half hours of makeup per day.

Tapie : the first makeup tests did not convince Laurent Lafitte and Tristan Séguéla

To camp Bernard Tapie, Laurent Lafitte was therefore transformed physically, with essential aesthetic appointments, including the wig, no less than four of which were used to follow Tapie’s evolution over time. This transformation which was the subject of a long reflection as Tristan Séguéla told us. “We worked in advance, and we did numerous tests with a prosthetist and a makeup artist. For the first tests, a prosthetist took Laurent’s prints, to create prostheses which were supposed to approximate the face of Bernard Tapie, the more protruding jaws in particular, and I was not at all convinced by the result. Laurent didn’t either, there was too much plastic, Laurent disappeared behind a mask and that’s not at all what I wanted to film“.

Tapie : Laurent Lafitte gained weight to play Tapie in the late 1990s

Tristan Séguéla and Laurent Lafitte decided to take another direction. “We opted for something much lighter with small additions. It may seem strange to dedicate three hours every morning to inserting very small prostheses here and there, a light one on the nose for example, but I believe that it allowed us to Laurent Lafitte to delimit its territory. It was also an airlock for him every day, to no longer completely be him. He knew that he had this space that was going to be his to create a character that was not going to be a simple imitation of Bernard Tapie that everyone knew. And it is on this ground that he modeled his character.”

Beyond the prosthetics, Laurent Lafitte had to gain weight for the role. “He had lost weight before filming, so he was fit to be the young Bernard Tapie of the first episodes.”says Tristan Séguéla, “OHe spent two months during which he began to gain weight. And then we stopped for a little over a month, so that he gained around fifteen kilos between the first three episodes and the following four in which he was thicker. He’s fifteen kilos heavier, you can see it in the image.”