“I was a little Arab with glasses, overweight, but with a famous brother”

“This photo must have been taken in 1994 or 1995, I think I am 4 or 5 years old. My mother had a café-restaurant in Clichy [Hauts-de-Seine], Le Jardin des oliviers, and all I know is that a client had offered him a plan to buy one of the very first private Jacuzzis in France. It had therefore been installed in the bathroom of the Gennevilliers pavilion where we lived with my grandparents. We moved there when my brother, Ramzy, started having success – a way to leave the estate where we grew up while remaining close enough for my grandmother to stay next door to her friends.

It was the only pavilion in front of the city, and, as my mother and my grandmother have very bad taste, they covered the lawn with earthenware brought from I don’t know where, brought fountains from Cordoba and this column that we see in the background… It was the Kardashian Pavilion in Gennevilliers. A bit like the footballers who buy the complete window displays at Dior with their first big check.

I had a very cool childhood, marked by the sudden fame of Ramzy, who came to pick me up in a Porsche at school or brought back Jamel Debbouze and Éric Judor to applaud me at the fair. I was a little Arab with glasses, overweight, but with a famous brother. I decided to look on the bright side of things and quickly spotted interested people. In many of my childhood photos (all of which my mother scanned and archived for the film production designers who often ask for them), I laugh. On this one, despite the diva bathrobe and the columns, there is a gap between my feelings and the decor.

“I was the ‘girl next door’ before Bridget, I’m the eastern Bridget Jones of the end of line 13.”

It is of course something that I exploit in my work, but this person always a little aside, it is me. I was there girl next door before Bridget, I am the eastern Bridget Jones of the end of line 13. And we are a lot like that. We are sold girls who arrive with hyperfit, drink a gourd of protein when they wake up before going indoor cycling at Dynamo, but I know a lot of girls who, even if they have everything for them, are always side. We say that things are changing, that representations are changing, but, in the cinema or on television, we continue to consider a ” difference “ as a defect.

At home, normality has been shaken up a bit by the success of Ramzy. He was a delivery boy at Pizza Hut, and then he met Eric Judor and, overnight, he was a star. As a child, I was hyperintroverted while enjoying being the center of attention. The more my brother became known, the more it relaxed me and helped me to assert myself. Like my brother and my sister Rania, I was educated in a private Catholic school, because my grandfather, who was a RATP driver, then became a taxi, wanted to put us in the best school. I skipped CE1 because I was a little early, had the baccalaureate at 16…

I had very good grades, but, in fact, I just wanted to make jokes. Later, after a double degree at the Sorbonne, I didn’t really know what to do with my life, and it was Diam’s, who was friends with Rania and Ramzy and often came to watch Turkish or Egyptian soap operas with my grandmother, who offered to accompany me on tour. I was supposed to do the dressing and styling, but on the first day she told me that I would also be opening for her. »