A speech as if to confirm the start of a great career.
Raphaël Quenard won the César for male breakthrough this Friday, February 23, for his role in
Junkyard Dog
and stood out with a speech full of literary references and humor.
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Break down the house
For several months we had only been talking about him.
After
Dog from the Junkyard
by Jean-Baptiste Durand, released in April 2023, he particularly attracted attention a few months later in
Yannick
by Quentin Dupieux: “I have not become a fat man who gives orders from his armchair with "sounding films", so much so that he was strongly anticipated for the César for best male revelation.
When his name was pronounced by the 2023 winner, Bastien Bouillon, he exhaled, as if relieved, and hugged his playmates. But it was above all on the stage of the Olympia, when receiving his prize that he distinguished himself, in a speech without notes, disarmingly natural.
Like always.
Seeing the audience glued to his lips, we felt that something was happening.
Big smile and relaxed, the 32-year-old actor retraced his short but already rich cinematographic career, wishing to thank in particular the directors with whom he worked: “Thank you to the filmmakers who give us free rein to gesticulate in their universe,” he declared.
His witty words or quotes from the poet Christian Bobin triggered loud applause in the room.
Always lyrical, Raphaël Quenard then gave into passion: “I have a sentence that I heard: 'Our lives are punctuated by suffering and sorrow.
But the most terrible of them is to see ourselves every day trying to suffocate the little child within us.”
So comfortable that he allowed himself to use irony and derision, provoking laughter from the audience.
He then wanted to be more serious by turning into a sort of pamphleteering moment.
“As the grandson of a farmer, culture, like everything else, is nothing.
Thank you to all these people who work hard to offer us the luxury of filling our stomachs with good fruits, good vegetables, good cereals,” he said on the eve of the opening under high tension of the Agricultural Show.
Despite the little music that began to be heard, ordering him to finish, the man who was also nominated in the categories of best actor and best documentary short film, insisted on concluding, like a politician, with a “Long live France , Hail Caesar”.
The advent of a great actor, without a doubt.