Presented in world preview at the Canneséries festival, the miniseries carpet (our opinion on the first two episodes) follows the course of Bernard Tapie (disappeared October 2021) from the late 1960s until his incarceration in 1997. In the title role, Laurent Lafitte delivers an impressive performance, avoiding the pitfall of mimicry to reveal “his” Tapie. And precisely, this miniseries weaves a true-false portrait of the ex-entrepreneur, singer, politician, actor, president of OM. It is this interstice that interested the creators of “this” carpet (which will be launched on the Netflix platform on September 13 and about which Bernard Tapie, during his lifetime, had expressed his refusal), Tristan Seguela et Olivier Demangelas they confided in an interview…
Tapie (Netflix): the genesis
The project to tell the life of Bernard Tapie is not new and took a long time to see the light of day, as explained by the co-creator of the miniseries, Tristant Séguéla: “10 years ago, on the set of my first film, 16 years or so, already with Laurent, I said to him in the dressing rooms “It’s crazy, you look like Bernard Tapie.” Immediately afterwards, he told me that his secret hope is to play Tapie in a film one day. I tell him that I have the same secret hope of telling his life story. We then said to ourselves that we were going to try to do it. Well, it took a bit of time. (laughs) This miniseries is the portrait of a legend. Tapie is someone who has done everything to become a legend. He’s been at it all his life and that’s really what we tells. Already in his adolescence, he was obsessed with the idea of making his name a brand. What we can say is that he succeeded and better than well. The proof, this series exists!
The continuation under this advertisement
Tapie (Netflix): “The idea was to deliver our vision of Tapie, that I compose my version of Tapie” according to Laurent Lafitte
Bernard Tapie was a character in himself, larger than life, romantic. Laurent Lafitte apprehended and thought about it, staying well away from any caricature and mimicry. “The” Tapie of this miniseries is recognizable without ever being a copy-paste of the original. “That’s how we wanted to approach it” slides Laurent Lafitte before specifying “The miniseries opens on a period of his life that we know less well. So we don’t yet have all the visual codes that will develop in the following episodes. It is evolving quite a bit. But the idea c was really to make our vision of Tapie, that I compose my version of Tapie, that he is always present, that one never has the impression that it is not him that I interpret but that I do not not completely disappear into the character, that I remain present.”
Tapie (Netflix): true from false
“We sometimes have fun thinking that, in this series, everything is 50% true” announces with a touch of mischief Tristan Séguéla, before continuing: “Bernard Tapie could have sold TVs like that in his shop. But everything is very inspired by facts that we learned about by documenting him. There are thousands of archives that we can consult and some of which are not have never been discovered by your colleagues. By searching very deeply on the INA site, for example, we made some astonishing discoveries. He is someone who has done a lot to be as much as possible in television after having started to sell televisions. It is this trajectory that we tell. It is great to know that you may have thought that such a scene was perhaps true and another necessarily false. It is a series that the people will perhaps look while consulting Wikipedia in parallel. They will have fun comparing the true with the false and it is not unpleasant. It is part of the exercise.
The continuation under this advertisement
We will have to wait a bit before disentangling the true from the false of “this” carpet. The miniseries should land on Netflix on Friday, September 13…
