Had Loana been consulted for the Cult series?

It is Marie Colomb who plays the late winner of the first season of Loft Story, whose involvement in the project remains unclear.

She was a symbol for an entire generation of viewers.

Magazine blondeness and performance of ultra-femininity: it is through this prism that Loana, the most famous reality TV candidate, presented herself to the public on April 26, 2001 during the premiere of Loft Story. A moment in media history replayed by the Culte series, broadcast this evening unencrypted on M6 (after streaming on Prime Video), just a few days after the announcement of Loana’s tragic death.

Cult makes the character of Loana one of the main arcs of the series, right up to her victory, right up to the dizzying media coverage she received. French TV has never been the same again. Neither does she.

The Loft is the first emergence of reality TV in France, then adapted from a Dutch concept by John De Moll. The production company founded at the time now produces some of the biggest hits in entertainment, from Star Academy to LOL, Who Laughs Comes Out. But these early attempts were bathed in trash (a term that served as the series’ working title), and millennial audiences still remember “the pool scene” broadcast live…

Loana Petrucciani thus became the candidate coming from precariousness and propelled without a net into the entertainment industry. Moreover, the production of Cult did not really associate the former TV star with the project. Marie Colomb, the excellent actress revealed by Laetitia (and who will be in the casting of Les Misérables at the cinema this year), told us at the time that she had sent a letter to Loana to tell her about the series. To tell her that she was going to play her role. But she told us that she had never interacted with her directly.

Loana had given a single interview, in the pages of Here to give her opinion on all this:

“It’s weird to me. To see someone who looks like you, with your life… I’m not going to say that I’m a fan. I cried the first time I saw it. I see myself again, I have the images in my head of what I experienced. I said to myself: ‘It’s no big deal’. But when I first saw the trailer, I didn’t think it would have that effect on me.”

Credited in the Culte credits as a “consultant”, Loana assured that the production had never shown her the episodes before broadcast: “They never asked me: ‘Are we doing that? I haven’t even met the actress who looks like me…”

As successful as it is, the Cult series did not fail to attract the wrath of certain veterans, such as Angela Laurente, the “mother of lofters” who rightly recalled that this fiction about the world of television “is a partial vision, and that is not what I experienced.” And added: “The real heroes of this story are the loft owners, who were a little, even a lot, let go…”