They “did not force the alchemy”: the three actors who will take on the main roles of the musical show Hate: so far nothing has changed easily project the energy of the trio from the cult film, six months from first performances.
There’s laughter and room in the large hall of the LDLC Arena near Lyon, in which this stage transposition, in around fifteen scenes, will be performed in November, a little over a month after the Parisian debut. Samy Belkessa, Alivor and Alexander Ferrario, actors-dancers-singers, slip into the roles of Saïd, Hubert and Vinz, following a casting process lasting several months which saw 3,000 candidates pass by. “It is they who will have to ensure that the emotion passes,” underlines director Mathieu Kassovitz, who revisits his original work.
Also read: “Hate is Kassovitz’s business”: Saïd Taghmaoui denounces a charade
These three characters, rough-hewn suburbanites confronted with police violence, are “the base”. In 1995, they were played by Saïd Taghmaoui, Hubert Koundé and Vincent Cassel. “It’s a relay that we take,” explains Alivor, Le Havre rapper recognized on streaming platforms, who will “step out of (his) comfort zone” with this first role. “We do the same race, but we run differently,” he sums up. “Take inspiration” from their predecessors “so as not to distort the film”, says Samy Belkessa, but “not to copy/paste”.
They were “little or not born” when the film was released, but all three had long integrated it into their cinematic culture. Samy Belkessa always thought that he would have “loved having the role of Saïd”. “Perhaps everything was written,” notes the young actor, discovered in the social thriller Anti-Squat. When he was little, this son of a salsa dancer did hip-hop duet battles with his big brother.
The journey of Alexander Ferrario, a Franco-Argentinian actor seen in Hafsia Herzi’s first film and on Netflix, began with a wild casting call. “I was asked questions: what do you hate? I didn’t make the connection with the film. I was answering personal things,” he says. To get closer to Vinz, he adds a language, an attitude, “but the base is mine”. “What I find strong in this film is three guys who “golri” (laugh, editor’s note) in trouble,” notes Alivor. “Same anger, same struggles” today as almost thirty years ago, but “the same laughter too”.
“If things had changed, there would have been no interest in doing the project,” observes Mathieu Kassovitz, while the suburbs were still on fire in June after the death of Nahel, killed by the police after a refusal to comply. But what the new show wants to highlight, more than the police blunders which have been widely denounced since, is “the demand for respect”.
The show can “offer spectators additional elements of understanding” of the film, underlines producer Farid Benlagha. It will allow us to “go a little further”, and also opens up, with the presence of female characters in particular. “We want people to leave the show with the emotion they had when the film came out,” breathes Mathieu Kassovitz, who directs with Serge Denoncourt, even if they already know the ending. The premiere is scheduled for October 10 at the Seine musicale, in the Paris region. The show will then travel to the regions, notably to Marseille from November 8 to 10 and to Lyon from November 15 to 17.
