The young Esther Blanc, who plays Zoé in “Les Bracelets rouge”, talks about her collaboration with Liliane Rovère and Michaël Gregorio. And tells us about filming a scene she won’t soon forget, in stifling heat.
Broadcast every Monday on TF1, season 4 of the series Les Bracelets rouge, which ends this evening, introduces a new generation of sick adolescents into the Aracachon hospital which has served as the setting for the plot since the premiere. season proposed in 2018.
Among these ultra endearing new characters, there is Zoé, played by Esther Blanc, who is admitted to hospital for a broken arm and discovers, by chance, that her state of health is actually much more serious.
“Zoé lives in a separate world in which only maths counts. She has lived in a bubble since the disappearance of her parents, encouraged in her brilliant studies by her brother and her grandmother. Her only dream is to enter Oxford and nothing can stop her, until the day the illness catches up with her…”explains Esther Blanc.
“I really liked the perseverance and stubbornness of this character. Shaping the character of this completely “off the mark” teenager was very interesting and funny! Her way of walking, as straight as her words, her gullibility or still his high and sharp voice, as well as his incessant flow of words, are fascinating to interpret”.
“It was very, very hot, it was catastrophic”
In Les Bracelets rouge, Zoé is very close to her big brother Darius, a young intern played by Michaël Gregorio, but also to her grandmother, played by Lilane Rovère (Dix pour cent). Two experienced actors with whom young Esther Blanc had a lot of fun playing.
“I particularly remember an emotional scene that I had to play with Liliane Rovère, who plays my grandmother on screen”the young actress told us. “It was quite incredible. I had a lot of apprehension because it was a big emotional scene. But the fact that it was Liliane who gave me the answer ultimately made things easy. It really was a magnificent game encounter, with a real return of emotion from her. Liliane supported me in my game, it was really great”.
PHILIPPELEROUX/VEMA/TF1
As for Michaël Gregorio, he has visibly established himself as a big brother in front of and behind the camera if we are to believe Esther Blanc’s statements about him: “Playing with Michaël was a real pleasure. I think he really considered me like his little sister”. In the first episode of season 4, Zoé and Darius notably share a scene in a car. And Esther Blanc has memorable memories of the complicated filming of this sequence.
“It was 50 degrees in that car (laughs)”she recalls to our microphone. “It was very complicated, and at the same time very funny because we laughed a lot with Michaël. We couldn’t put the air conditioning in the car because of the sound, we couldn’t hear it in the car. screen. So we put it between takes, so as not to suffocate, but after a while the air conditioning failed, it no longer worked at all (laughs)”.
“It was close to 40 degrees outside, 50 degrees inside the car. It was really very, very hot, it was difficult to bear. We were sweating so much that the makeup artist couldn’t even wipe us off (laughs). It was catastrophic.”.
Esther Blanc is therefore not about to forget this hot day on the set of Red Bracelets. Fortunately, the magic of television meant that viewers didn’t notice anything.