Théodore Pellerin, 27, the most exciting Canadian actor to come along in I can’t think when, has a peach of a role in the new Disney+ miniseries Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, and he makes the most of every mouthful. (It premiered June 7.)
Paris, 1972. Lagerfeld (Daniel Brühl, Good Bye, Lenin!, Rush), 38, is a non-smoking, non-drinking, non-drugging workhorse who lives with his mother. He can be found at parties and nightclubs, but in the corner, alone; he can design, he boasts, “15 collections at a time with my eyes closed,” yet none under his own name. Hiding in plain sight, he wears a corset under his vests and lifts in his shoes – though his signature fan and ponytail won’t appear until Episodes 3 and 5 (out of six).
Enter Jacques de Bascher (Pellerin, Solo), 21, a French jetsetter from a bourgeoisie Catholic family, an underground icon of Paris nightlife in the 1970s and 80s. Beautiful, haughty, he says yes to everything, and though he craves love, he’d rather be cruel than vulnerable. For the next 17 years, until he dies of complications from AIDS, de Bascher is Lagerfeld’s angel, and his demon.
Becoming Karl Lagerfeld is the third recent splashy miniseries to mine the grime beneath the glamour of famous designers’ lives, after Halston (Netflix), an on-the-nose condemnation of how the king of Ultrasuede (Ewan McGregor) squandered his talent chasing fame and cocaine; and The New Look (AppleTV+), a supermodel-thin take on the contrasting paths Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) and Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche) chose to survive the Nazi occupation of Paris and its aftermath. (As well, a documentary, Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge, arrives on Hulu June 25.)
But Halston and The New Look feel like cosplay compared with Becoming Karl Lagerfeld. Created by Isaure Pisani-Ferry, Jennifer Have and Raphaëlle Bacqué, the series is thoroughly French, and startlingly intimate. We see Lagerfeld struggle with an eating disorder, an aversion to sex, a lust for recognition and a profound creative jealousy of his rival Yves Saint Laurent (Arnaud Valois). We watch as de Bascher tries to destroy both himself and Lagerfeld – hosting drug-fuelled orgies in Lagerfeld’s apartment; flaunting an affair with Saint Laurent – just to see if Lagerfeld will fight to save them.
That angel/demon dichotomy? That’s how “extremely generous people who had close, intimate relationships” with de Bascher described him to Pellerin during his research, the actor told me in a video call this week. Often the stories contradicted one another: “Some people told me Jacques and Karl had sex, others said no, never.” But all agreed de Bascher “wasn’t just a partier and a gigolo,” Pellerin says. “He had a well-thought-out philosophy of life, and his life was his art.”
Pellerin also read the books that were de Bascher’s touchstones: Thomas Mann’s paeans “to youth and beauty, the poetry of love and sexual desire;” Huysmans’s La Bas, about Satanism. “That made me understand that Jacques had a real relationship with verticality,” Pellerin says. “He wanted to go high and to go low. He understood what light and enlightenment were, and what darkness was. He played with those things. People describing him as an angel and as a demon – he created that.”
Fascinating dichotomy is quickly becoming Pellerin’s specialty: the drag queen who’s fierce on stage but crushed by an indifferent mother and brutal lover in the Quebec film Solo. The pyramid scammer whose brashness can’t disguise his clammy panic in the Showtime series On Becoming a God in Central Florida, starring Kirsten Dunst. The sensitive solider Marquis de Lafayette opposite Michael Douglas in the AppleTV+ series Franklin.
“Isn’t conflict, tension, duality the essence of a good character?” Pellerin asks. “If a character doesn’t have a conflict, either don’t play him, or make one up. Otherwise there’s no reason to watch him.”
Quebec has had its eyes on Pellerin for years, but it was Sophie Dupuis’s 2018 crime drama Family First (she also made Solo) that netted him a Canadian Screen Award for Best Actor. “Shooting that was a revelation and an expansion for me,” Pellerin says. “The role demanded such freedom. I thought, ‘Ah, okay, this is what acting is supposed to feel like.’ Once I knew that feeling, I started understanding what I had to do to get it.”
Playing de Bascher “demanded a different kind of freedom, a seductive, sexual freedom, an extreme comfort in that,” Pellerin continues. “It can’t just be your character who feels it – you have to understand it within yourself. You have to allow yourself to be that way, and then it belongs to you, even if you don’t use it all the time.”
Growing up in Montreal with artist parents – his mother is the dancer and choreographer Marie Chouinard and his father is the painter Denis Pellerin – Pellerin “always felt there was a freedom to what I could do, who I wanted to be,” he says. “That’s a great privilege, for that to feel natural. I don’t think I’m a product of nepotism, but I can’t deny that my background played some part in the small scene of Montreal.”
These days his canvas is limitless – shooting Franklin at Paris’s Palais Royale, for example, in scrupulous period costume, surrounded by 50 snorting, stamping horses. He just wrapped his next film, Lurker, the directorial debut of Alex Russell, who wrote for Beef and The Bear. He plays the title character, a stalker who insinuates himself into the life of a pop star played by Archie Madekwe (Saltburn).
“Of course I’m ambitious,” Pellerin says. “Because I want my work to be good. Working with great writing, actors and directors is the one thing that makes me happy, that makes my life make sense. My life made so much sense when I was shooting Becoming Karl Lagerfeld. Work like that is the dream, to do things that you’re completely in love with every time.
“I loved working on the scenes so much that even before we started shooting I had a sense of grief – ‘Argh, these scenes that I’m so excited about, that take on another dimension every time I read them, I’m so sad that in two weeks they will be over.’ More and more I find, it’s not about how the work will be received. It’s not about how it may change my life. It’s about how changed I feel by the work.” De Bascher would approve.
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