Axel Auriant and Maxence Danet-Fauvel - Biiinge Interview.
Axel: No, no, but it’s that…let’s go. I’ll do redo it. Can you ask me again? Great, cut!
“Your biggest laughing fit?”
Maxence: It was during rehearsals on the first day, we took at least an hour to recover. I don’t have many scenes with the boys, but I can remember one in the school…where clearly, it was hell.
Axel: Oh, the one where you die at the end?
Maxence: Yeah, that’s the one.
“One thing you had to learn for the show?”
Maxence: Bipolar disorder. I didn’t know how to play that. I was coached, by my acting coach. I talked about it to people around me, especially to a close friend, whose mother has bipolar.
Axel: And I had to learn the piano. I had the good idea of telling David: “what if we did a song on the piano?”, on June 21st, we found the texts. And David chose the most complicated of the songs we had thought about. So I had to work on it for about 2 months. At first I only had the four notes, and they were thinking “this isn’t going to work”. And it worked on the day of the shooting. Without a backing track.
“The best compliment from a fan?”
Axel: I think it’s when we got a message from a young girl who said that after watching an episode of Skam France, she found the confidence to come out to her parents. And when we started shooting, we told ourselves that if we could help one young person be proud of who they are, to be confident…I think it was the most beautiful message, and the person sent it to the three of us, David, Maxence and myself, and we all sent it to each other saying “guys, we did it!”.
“Your favorite line?”
Maxence: When I introduce myself in episode 1, there’s a bus stop, and Chloé sits between us. She asks for my name, she’s a little bit pushy. I answer her, and then I lean forward to look at him and I say “I’m Eliott”.
Axel: Oh god, he’s amazing! He’s like “I’m Eliott”, like that. With a little…you do it better than me. With a little look, and then we’re like “ooof”. I completely neglected the impact it would have, and it’s true that after episode 1 aired, it was the line that stuck. And it was pretty crazy.
Maxence: Yeah, it’s true, that was cool. It immediately set the tone.
Axel: Yeah, absolutely.
“A prop you would have liked to take home?”
Maxence: So first of all, there were a lot of our things on the shoot.
Axel: Yeah, about that, Glenn, if you can give back my grey sweatshirt, I would be eternally grateful.
Maxence: We shot with our own clothes. Well 75% were our own clothes, so obviously we kept those. There was one outfit that I wanted to keep and that I was allowed to keep. Actually, no, it’s because those were my clothes as well!
Axel: For real?
“A secret that no one knows about shooting?”
Maxence: It was the first kiss scene. We’d been shooting for at least twelve hours.
Axel: And it was raining, so we had to stop shooting. It was really…
Maxence: Because it had to rain only in that moment. It rained, so we waited an hour and we tried to put away all the equipment.
Axel: So they were moving the equipment with a cable, like during a hike. It was really something. We’d climb back up to the dressing rooms.
Maxence: We almost went abseiling. We had a rain machine, and no spare clothes. We were told “guys, we have one take”. We had already shot kiss scenes before, and the director would tell us like “more tongue, more intensity!”. Since he would always tell us that it was “not good” when we kissed, in that moment we thought “fuck, we don’t have a choice, we can’t mess up”.
Axel: It’s true that we’re being cocky about it now, but at the time we were really scared, because we really realised that it was such an important moment. And frankly, I love that scene.
Maxence: Yeah, me too.
