Inside ‘La Comédie-Française’: Unifrance Rendez-Vous Opener Sends Up France’s Most Elite Arts Institution

The backstage farce “La Comédie-Française” took a well-deserved bow as the opener at this year’s Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris - an auspicious spotlight for a project not originally meant to be a film. Sold by Charades , the crowd-pleasing feature began as a pandemic-era mashup between two digital-native sketch comedians and France’s most venerable arts institution, founded by royal decree of Louis XIV. “During COVID, the Comédie-Française launched its YouTube channel and saw that many people were tuning in to online theater,” says co-director Bertrand Usclat. “That sparked the idea of branching into digital formats. They approached us to create short sketches and social-media vignettes to show a different side.” Popular on Variety Usclat and his collaborators loved the concept - but quickly realized the format didn’t fit. “Honestly, theater and social media don’t make for a very happy marriage,” Usclat admits. “Filming theater is always tricky, whether with a camera or a phone. So we came back with a counterproposal: ‘Short clips aren’t the right format. But what about a TV series, something in the vein of ‘Call My Agent!,’ where each member of the Comédie-Française plays themselves? We could tell the behind-the-scenes story of the institution and show life on the other side of the curtain - what everyday life is like for these people in a place that is anything but.’” Soon, Usclat and his collaborators Martin Darondeau and Pauline Clément - herself a popular sketch comic and member of the historic troupe - won over both the Comédie-Française and producers Mathieu and Thomas Verhaegh. Finding a broadcaster, however, proved far more challenging. “We wrote the series for over a year and were very happy with the result, but after pitching it to all the French TV channels, everyone said no,” Usclat recalls. “We ended up with a project we believed in deeply, but that nobody wanted.” Then an opening appeared: a five-day window in June 2025 when the theater’s main stage would be free during the daytime. Such an opportunity might not present itself for years - perhaps even decades. They couldn’t let it slip. By February, the team was off to the races. Usclat, Darondeau, Clément, and Clémence Dargent reworked the series into a 70-page script, while producers Mathieu and Thomas Verhaegh leveraged the success of a previous feature - Quentin Dupieux’s “Yannick,” which also took place in a single theater - to secure full financing in a whirlwind two weeks. Next came convincing the theater’s governing body. “There’s a whole internal political process at the Comédie-Française, and we had to persuade the actors’ society to accept a project they couldn’t read, simply because it hadn’t been written yet,” laughs co-director Martin Darondeau. “[The administrator] Éric Ruf argued that all actors on the governing committee had once been trusted in similar situations, so now they should trust Pauline [who’s one their own]. It was a pure bluff!” And it worked. The project would shoot for 15 days in June 2025, taking advantage of unprecedented access...

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