I will tell you all this on France 2: “My character hides heavy secrets”… Bruno Solo’s confidence

This Thursday, February 8, Bruno Solo presents All I’ll Give You, a modern family saga in which he lends his personality to Richard, a recently retired ex-cop who leads the investigation into a suspect in Aymeric’s death. Son of a powerful family. To find out the truth, he will work with the husband of the deceased, Manuel Ortigosa (David Cameno). Together they will reveal the secrets of this family.

At the La Rochelle French Fantasy Festival, AlloCiné caught up with Bruno Solo to talk about the series, but also about this counterproductive role.

AlloCiné: You’re casting for a mini-series this Thursday, I’ll give it all to you. Can you tell us about the fiction as well as your role?

Bruno Solo : The series is adapted from a Spanish novel, I will give you all this by Dolores Redondo, which is a huge bestseller in Spain and around the world. This is a family saga full of secrets.

It is also the story of two men who had no reason to meet and who must work together to uncover the truth. They are very different, if only physically.

On the one hand, we have a kind of Don Quixote, a very tall and very thin man, and on the other hand, we have me, a thin man. Manuel is gay, erudite, brilliant, dark… and meets this reactive, conservative, apparently withdrawn boy who hides dark secrets.

They get to know each other and discover the truth about each other, especially my character, who will come a long way from the fatalism in which he is trapped. He is a transparent person who knows that he is not seductive and that he is rejected by most people, including his own family.

It will reveal itself little by little. And that’s why I think the series is very beautiful. Rocks and turns aside, this is a matchup between two men that we rarely see on television. I am proud that I had to defend this role on television.

Did Dolores Redondo have a say in writing the series? Did he come to the set?

I think he made his point. He has a very strong character, so I can’t imagine that there was no point in adapting it. Once he came to the set, but I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t meet him.

I met him in Biarritz when we came to do international sales for the series. However, there were changes in the adaptation. The book takes place in Galicia, a very harsh region in the northwest of Spain, above Portugal.

In the French version, we changed the settings radically, because we are in the south of France, which is a very sunny and bright region. I think Dolores probably confirmed this change. But even if the atmosphere changes, the psychology of the characters remains the same.

He had to watch the episodes. Didn’t he give you a job?

Yes, he liked what I did with Richard’s character. He told me that’s how he saw it. So that made me happy. He said this with great severity, for he is not one to pour his heart out. He told me that he was exactly what he expected from the character, both physically and in his interpretation.

Speaking of character, Richard is the archetype of a common form of homophobia. For example, he finds it difficult to say:Your husbandManuel’s character and continues by saying:your friend“…

I don’t think he is homophobic. It is an ideology. I think he’s just intellectually lazy, like a lot of people. It comes across in diagrams and caricatures. It has a kind of intellectual laziness that makes it impossible to analyze it in a little more detail.

But what I like about him is that he realizes very quickly that he is an idiot. He knows that he is narrow-minded, he knows that he is steeped in meaningless certainty, and he does not try to escape the image that he projects.

When we see this, we tell ourselves that it must be a big idiot. And he said to himself:Because you think I’m a big idiot, I’ll be a big idiot“. But in reality it is much more complicated. Over the course of the episodes, we discover that he is a wounded and bruised man on the inside.

It is these injuries that explain his persistence in this investigation. He is actually in a kind of determinism that others have locked him into. But I don’t think he’s inherently homophobic. These are more bistro notes.

He is a bogeyman and develops this image because he believes that you should keep your distance from victims and suspects. But there is a reason to investigate it. He uses Manuel as a Trojan horse to infiltrate this family and discover its secrets.

This is a very personal investigation for him as he seeks the truth. The truth about the accident, but also the truth that is more directly related to it and which we gradually discover.

It’s pretty rare to find an openly gay character as a main character on a prime time channel and in prime time. Do you think this is a desire to change mentality on the part of France Télévisions?

I don’t look at all the fiction, but it feels like it’s already been done. If I didn’t mess it up in the movie. But I still get the impression that today these issues are approached without false modesty. We start with the idea that two men are married.

And my character is in somewhat conservative France, which still has a hard time imagining that two people of the same gender can get married. I actually represent a certain segment of the population that will have to move forward because this is the unchanging course of history and we have to stop fighting things as they are.

Fighting this is a foolish and losing battle. And I think the public service is really more and more about these kinds of things.

Is there a scene in “All I Give You” that particularly struck you?

I was especially surprised by the 6th episode. We understand who Richard is, what drives him, and what darkness has clouded his entire existence and caused him to become this unpleasant, boisterous, boorish, aggressive and clumsy person.

We will learn what he went through to become this 60-year-old man who has given up on the idea of ​​pleasure. He does not attract sympathy, be it from his superiors, his colleagues or his family. In the end, Richard became almost a caricature of himself. But as the series progresses, we understand, and that’s what makes it so touching.