After the cancellation of the Marseille soap was made official on May 5, Laurent Kérusoré, who had played Thomas Marci for 18 seasons, expressed his fears for the post-“Plus Belle la vie”.
After having lent his features for eighteen years to the character of Thomas Marci in Plus Belle la vie, the announcement of the end of the soap opera of France 3 last week was a shock for Laurent Kérusoré.
If the latter had previously described the rumors about the end of the series as “open secret“on social networks, its confirmation by the executives of the France Télévisions group on Thursday May 5 in the Belle de Mai studios, on the very Place du Mistral where thousands of hours of fiction have been filmed since 2004, was just as painful for the actor.
In the columns of Telerama, he spoke about his feelings at the end of this news, which marks the end of the longest soap opera ever broadcast on French television. “Plus belle la vie broke all longevity records, I naively thought that the public service was proud of us, of the showcase role we played for it. That we would be their Fires of love, an endless series. I was convinced that we were going to last at least twenty years“, he regrets.
Reacting with emotion to this stop justified by a gradual decline in audiences for the series on France 3, Laurent Kérusoré evokes “a discrepancy” between the artistic teams who have devoted themselves to the soap opera for almost twenty years and this decision coming from above. the part of the broadcaster. “It’s a rather brutal divorce for an emotional person like me, who doesn’t understand much about economic justifications…“
Asked about the end of the series, necessarily reviewed and corrected following the announcement of the cessation of broadcasting – the last episode of which is scheduled for November 18 – the actor reveals that all the plots planned for the next few months “were thrown in the trash“.
The writers are currently busy writing an open ending because, he hopes, “‘we don’t know if, one day, elsewhere, in another way, More beautiful life will not come back. I have good hopes, for example, that we can do long episodes, in prime time, even if nothing is certain for the moment.“
Finally, the actor expresses his fears about the rest of his career, once the eighteen seasons of the series behind him, in which he played a strong societal role by illustrating the first gay marriage on the small screen in France. “I will always be in one way or another this character who has changed television and mentalities, who has done so much against homophobia…” To the point of locking him in a box?
“I hope it’s not going to be a crossing of the desert and that I’m going to find other, different roles, but I’m afraid I won’t be reworking all of after“, he confides. “An eighteen-year routine coming to an end is going to leave a little hole in my schedule!“
More beautiful life: impossible to have 10/10 in this quiz on the first episode of the series