First we hear his voice, that recognizable slightly dragging scratchy tone, which greets the waiters and immediately conveys its capital of sympathy.
Then there is Gtro, his inseparable Jack Russell, who sniffs the cushions of this cozy café in Montmartre and curls up comfortably.
Finally, around the counter, the long, disheveled, familiar silhouette emerges, in jeans and a sweater covered in the white hair of his dog: Jean-Paul Rouve is 55, the same New Balance sneakers as when he appeared on television with Les Robins des Bois in 1997, fifty-seven films to his credit since.
Read also "Their only goal in life is to be happy": The Tuches, or the recipe for crazy success
From Jeff Tuche to "Zai zai zai zai"
In real life, he's more like the soulful heroes of some of those films (notably those he directed) than Jeff Tuche, the swaggering patriarch turned box office king.
A child side in an adult body, comic book character, Gaston without the gaffes.
That's good, it's for
Zaï zaï zaï zaï
* that we meet him, a comedy taken from Fabcaro's comic strip, a poetic and absurd satire that one would think put on the screen just for him (in fact, the director, François Desagnat, had it in mind from the start).
There is Fabrice, an actor who goes into hiding at the checkout of a hypermarket, because he forgot his loyalty card.
In video, “Les Tuche” 4, the trailer
This surreal chase - the fugitive draws a leek to defend himself against a security guard, all the cars are orange Renault Capturs - seems to reconnect with the crazy burlesque of Robin Hoods, contrary to a more commercial Tuche humor.
But, beware: there is no question for Jean-Paul Rouve of affecting the slightest distance or even a vague irony vis-à-vis the saga with 14 million admissions.
"Proud" to be the co-author since episode 2, "overjoyed" to hear the lines repeated in the street, in advertisements, on the networks.
For the promotion of part 4, released at Christmas, he toured the multiplexes of France, not as an actor but
as Jeff Tuche himself
, curly hair, bacchantes and a thunderous arrival in a Renault Nevada at the entrance to the cinemas.
You had to see him shouting "fries, fries, fries" to the delirious crowd to understand that it is impossible to pretend to this degree.
Popular success, when it arrives at the right time on the head of a hard-working little guy from Dunkirk who started from nothing, is a pleasure that we do not sulk.
"Jeff Tuche, it's no coincidence," says a friend of thirty years, the cinematographer Christophe Offenstein, who knows Rouve since his first steps on the set of
Julie Lescaut
.
“Jean-Paul is in there, there is really him in this character.
Because he lived in a very humble environment, he respects it and doesn't deny it at all... But when you arrive in Paris, coming from a working-class family from Dunkirk, there are bound to be situations where you don't 're not well, out of step.
The Cours Florent of its beginnings is still quite bourgeois.
He didn't have the codes.
That, he interprets with all the more heart in
Les Tuche
as he has lived it.
There are real claims behind.
»
The worker's son
Jean-Paul Rouve almost died at birth on January 26, 1967. “They really thought I was dead, he says.
I was stuck inside, and my mom's pelvis was too small.
The doctors went to see my father saying: it will be the mother or the child.
It lasted an infinite time.
When I came out, you couldn't hear my heart beating anymore.
And then the midwife listened again with a stethoscope and shouted: “Yes, he is alive!”
I had very early desires elsewhere.
From 8, 9 years old, desires for acting, cinema, Paris...
Jean-Paul Rouvé
This initial anxiety colored his childhood.
"They were scared.
That my brain was not oxygenated enough, that I have a physical or mental retardation.
The doctors told my mother, “We don't advise you to get pregnant again.
There, it is a miracle.
Don't take that risk any more.” Jean-Paul therefore grew up as an only child, “ultra pampered, I never heard my father yell at me in my life”.
The latter, Marcel, son of peasants from the Lot, stopped school at 12 before "going up" in search of work in the factories of the North.
The Ateliers et Chantiers de France, a shipbuilding company, absorbed him at the rate of three-eight, then spat out at 50, industrial crisis, unemployment - "He found himself with nothing overnight".
The mother, Myriane, is the youngest of a family of the lower middle class Dunkirk - the maternal grandfather was mayor of the city.
This gap between their social origins has forged in their son a need to legitimize.
“I always felt it, my father was not well accepted in his in-laws.
And I was the last, my mother's brothers and sisters were older, my cousins much older.
I wanted to show that, even being the little one, the worker's son, I could succeed.
He also knows one thing: whatever the strength of the attachment, he will leave Dunkirk.
“I had very early desires elsewhere.
From 8, 9 years old, desires for acting, cinema, Paris… While I was happy, it's paradoxical.
Great parents, great friends… But I dreamed, I watched TV, I read, I invented my world.
For me, it was not possible to spend my whole life there.
I would have been unhappy to stay, I think.”
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love of futility
He goes there in stages, acting lessons, amateur troupe and DJ on the local radio as a teenager, then license of letters in Lille - the plan B to reassure.
Finally, Paris, Cours Florent, at 22 years old.
A young teacher, Isabelle Nanty, the future Madame Tuche, negotiates for him with the boss, François Florent.
In exchange for school fees, which he cannot pay, he will be a caretaker, responsible for opening and closing the famous theater course, taking out the trash, troubleshooting.
In his class are his future Robin Hood companions.
They break through after another eight years of hardship (he will be a sandwich man on the forecourt of La Défense, an office worker at the National Book Center…) when Dominique Farrugia takes them to his
Comédie channel!
, Jean-Paul Rouve is 30 years old.
“It was long, but so much the better.
Because it's a job… still abnormal.
When I see kids who find themselves very quickly very high… Something like
Les Tuche
, fortunately that does not happen to me at 20 years old.
I would have freaked out."
He is happy when his son, Clotaire, 15, whom he had with the novelist Bénédicte Martin, from whom he now lives separated, hears him working, "struggling on dialogues" with one of his companions in writing - Olivier Baroux for
Les Tuche
or David Foenkinos for the films they co-scripted and which Rouve shot.
“If there is anything to show a child, especially about a job like mine where you can quickly see only the success side, the glitter, it's the work.
I was lucky, unlike him, to be born into a modest background.
I know that the norm is people who work a lot to earn little.
Without seeing the slightest contradiction, he also teaches his son “the love of futility”.
“Having that perspective, knowing how to defuse, seeing the fun side of complicated situations.”
And above all, never choose between intellectual or popular pleasures.
“I remember seeing
PROFS
at the same age , with Patrick Bruel, and
Van Gogh
, of Pialat, and to have loved them so much.
It's not the same food, but both bring me.”
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The champion of intimacy
For his roles, he seeks the same diversity.
Even if it is often as a good funny guy that he triumphs (the camp monitor in
Our happy days
, the look-alike of Polnareff in
Podium
), it is in a detestable collaboration that he won the César for best male hope, for
Monsieur Batignole
.
Long subscribed to supporting roles, he created himself a first, by directing and interpreting in 2007
Without arms or hatred or violence
, on the robber Albert Spaggiari.
“Jean-Paul chose this character who needs to exist so much, notes Christophe Offenstein, because it suited him at that time.
Then he changed.
He was interested in less flamboyant themes, more distant from him.
A chronicle of intimacy, of the "little things in life", one could say to sum up the three films he made afterwards:
When I'm Little
,
Les Souvenirs
and
Lola et ses frères
.
“I love everyday life, confirms Rouve.
Looks, things left unsaid, positions in society, human beings in relation to each other… That's why we got on so well with David Foenkinos.
Paradoxically, by choosing subjects that are not me at all,
I love the daily.
Looks, things left unsaid, positions in society, human beings in relation to each other
Jean-Paul Rouvé
Recently, we talked about him to interpret the hero of the novel
Submission,
by Michel Houellebecq: François, a depressive college teacher who rallies to the new ruling party, La Fraternité Moslem.
The film, which is to be directed by Guillaume Nicloux, has not yet found its funding.
But in the meantime, another role, even more delicate, has been accepted by Jean-Paul Rouve.
He will be Gabriel Matzneff in the adaptation of
Consent,
by Vanessa Springora, shot in the spring by Vanessa Filho.
He is surprised that people are surprised that he wants to play the predator: “I don't know if you remember Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in
La Chute
.
He was extraordinary.
And the critics said: it's inadmissible what he did, he made him human.
Well, yes, Hitler was a human being.
We can try to believe that he comes from another planet, but no.
He was born on Earth, he had parents, it was a baby, a little boy.
The more human things are, the better one can understand the horror.
And it is certainly not to redeem it, on the contrary.
He is convinced that embodying Matzneff, the writer with claimed and long accepted pedophile practices, “is above all useful.
Because Matzneffs, despite the progress, there are still some.
As well as families, entourages who know and do nothing.
Telling this story can help other young girls.
As for going from Jeff Tuche to Gabriel Matzneff, there is something obvious for him.
"That's why you become an actor.
Player.
Not playing pretend, no: playing on purpose.
*Zaï zaï zaï zaï,
by François Desagnat, with Jean-Paul Rouve, Julie Depardieu, Ramzy Bedia… Released on February 23.