Shirine Boutella: “We want to do something new with Belphegor, with our creativity”

The actress has just started filming the new version of the legendary Ghost of the Louvre. She tells us how this rereading of Claude Barma’s classic was thought of.

After conducting the investigation Lupine on Netflix and while waiting to find her as a cannibal mother in The Rose Family (on OCS and Canal + at the end of the year), Shirine Boutella started filming last week last week Belphegorin a new version produced for M6 and the Max platform, a “Modern rereading“of history imagined by Claude Barma For ORTF, in the 1960s – and remake at the cinema around Sophie Marceau In the 2000s. Guest of the Séries Mania festival, the 34 -year -old actress reveals at first the first clues of what this new adaptation of a small French screen will give.

First: you attack Belphegor For a few days. What is the approach of the series?
Shirine Boutella: I tackle Belphegor Or Belphegor attack me! (laughs) In real life, I am very happy to retry a series of gender, with a character very different from what I have done lately. I play Hafsa, a freshly hired art restaurateur at the Louvre, rather tortured, who is undergoing something that goes beyond her. Is she crazy? Is it reality? Are there really ghosts? There is a psychological issue put forward in the series which is very interesting.

Will it be closer to the 1960s ORTF series or Jean-Paul Salomé’s film (2001)?
So I arrive in this project without any reference Belphegor in mind! I have not seen the series or the film and I don’t want to see them to draw something. Because I want to trust a new vision. We don’t want to be in comparison. We want to do something new with Belphegorwith our creativity to us.

Is it a bit stressful to tackle a myth of French TV?
There is a lot of pressure I admit. But afterwards, it is not just the actors and actresses who make a project. There are so many people around. There is a director with a vision, and Jérémy Mainguy emphasizes the disturbing atmosphere, with improbable things that happen … without saying too much, we are really in a conflict between the real and the unreal that takes place in her head.

Will you be able to turn to the Louvre museum?
Yes, but we must not imagine that we can walk like that in the corridors of the Louvre. It is archi framed. We have not yet started to film in it, but I already know that we have a lot of constraints and that we will have to film very quickly. Everything will be grid to the millimeter and the minute in this or that place. And all this night!