Inseparable from Jean-Claude Dusse, the flirtatious loser and hypochondriac of TannedMichel Blanc ended up hating this character which for a long time prevented him from diversifying his acting profession.
He owed his fame to him. But ended up hating him. Inseparable from Jean-Claude Dusse, the flirtatious loser and hypochondriac of Tanned whose lines have passed down to posterity, Michel Blanc did not hide his aversion for this character who over time became a “ball”.
An aversion linked to the very origins of the character. Michel Blanc had drawn on his own neuroses to imagine this character of Jean-Claude Dusse, the comic archetype of the skinny bald and unsuccessful flirt that he played many times in the cinema, from Tanned has Come to my house, I’m staying with a friend passing through My wife’s name is come back et Walk in the shade.
Michel Blanc constructed this character in opposition to that of Gérard Jugnot. “When I started, it wasn’t easy,” he confided to Monde in 2013. “I realized it, in a very violent way, when I replaced Gérard Jugnot in a show for a few days. He came on stage, and he made people laugh because he had a truculence. “
“I made people laugh more with the dialogue than with the physical expression,” he continued. “There was a certain type of character in which I was perfectly credible: the unlucky little flirtatious Frenchman. I went in that direction, that of Jean-Claude Dusse. And I made people laugh.”
“I didn’t want to be a comic actor”
Woody Allen, who also made fun of his awkwardness with women in his first films, was his model. “Jean-Claude Dusse is the very clumsy guy, a little desperate, who says to himself: ‘I can’t please a girl, but we’ll try anyway.’ It was by discovering Woody Allen’s films that I got the idea. On stage, everyone finds their own laugh,” he revealed in. The World in 2018.
Above all, self-deprecation allows him to reassure himself about his ability to make people laugh, he said in the same interview. “I suddenly realized that what could make people laugh in this kind of place was the guy who can’t do it. Not only who can’t come to a conclusion, but who women don’t even see . That made me laugh. That’s how I invented Jean-Claude Dusse.”
This character, however, was not his “objective” at the start of his career. “I didn’t want to be a comic actor,” he assured Le Monde in 2013. “I wanted to be an actor. From this point of view, THE Tanned didn’t help me. Before, I had played small roles in films by Bertrand Tavernier, Claude Miller, Serge Gainsbourg, Luc Béraud. Afterwards, I was somewhat banned from staying on those sets.”
If Michel Blanc had been able to diversify his activities in the cinema, in front of and behind the camera, and had won two prizes at Cannes and two Césars, he remained inseparable from his character of Tanned. “There were times when I felt like I was a prisoner of Jean-Claude Dusse,” he confided to Franceinfo in 2023. “I’m attached to it like a ball and chain,” he said to Critical Sense in 2020.
Dusse bodybuildé
Michel Blanc had moved away from it by breaking his image in films like Evening wear, Mr Hire or even The Witnesses et ExerciseState. And also by changing his physical appearance. The actor had built up his muscles and shaved his mustache, which he kept for a long time to create this character of a grumpy Frenchman.
The ten million entries of Tanned 3: Friends for Life did not help his ambivalent relationship with his character. Michel Blanc has never hidden his aversion to the result despite his success. “It’s not what we did best,” he said in Paris Match in 2023. “Finally, what I did best. I find myself absent.”
For Michel Blanc, who returns in the film as a body-built and hairy Dusse, “this failure is totally (his) fault. I didn’t want to make this film and I didn’t want them to do it without me .” He had always been opposed to making another part of Tanned: “Doing things together, yes, but not The Bronzed. We no longer know how to do this humor. It was almost fifty years ago, the world has moved on.”
Over time, he ended up making peace with his alter-ego. “Jean-Claude Dusse, the public has him at will, because the films are constantly on TV. I am no longer him physically, morally or artistically,” he insisted in October 2023 in the columns of the Sunday newspaper. Before concluding: “But I’m delighted to be called by my name in the street, it doesn’t bother me.”
