Désenchantées (France 2) – Constance Labbé: “Watching the series can help parents”
INTERVIEW. Constance Labbé plays Angélique, a woman whose best friend disappeared twenty years earlier. She is drawn back into her past when her sister (played by Marie Denarnaud), a journalist, writes about the case.
In your first scene, you break up a fight in a bar-restaurant. That sets the tone!
Constance Labbé: Exactly! (Laughs) When David Hourrègue, the director, first described Angélique to me, he used the word “powerful”. I think it was very important for him to show right away that she’s a woman who doesn’t take any nonsense anymore.
As a teenager, Angélique had an inner anger that sometimes made her want to destroy everything. Did you feel the same fierceness when you were younger?
I wasn’t like her because I played a lot of sports, which helped me let off steam. I also grew up with three older brothers, which helps channel my energy a bit! (Laughs) But I think all teenagers are, at some point, a little rebellious because they’re trying to find their place and have trouble finding it. We sometimes forget what adolescence is like, the intensity of the feelings involved, the difficulty of relating to others and to one’s own body. Watching Désenchantées can help parents.
What would you like to relive from that time?
The absence of cell phones and social media. It was great to really connect with people, to invent games, to call friends by throwing pebbles at the window, to call a landline and say, “Hello sir, could I speak to Victoire, please?” (Laughs)
Are you still in touch with your childhood friends?
I have my group of “désenchantées” friends, including Sophie and Victoire, whom I met in first grade, and who are like sisters to me. We call ourselves the Triplets! The hardest part of our friendship has been seeing each other in our adult lives. When others grow up, move, get married, become mothers, have demanding jobs, or no longer react the same way, it can be disorienting.
Angélique instilled in her son, Eder (played by Simon Rodzynek, winner of the Adami Young Male Hope Award at the 2025 La Rochelle Fiction Festival), that “lying is for cowards”. Is that also your motto?
I don’t lie. It actually annoys me when I hear people say that as an actress, I must be a very good liar… But, for me, acting is completely different. Lying involves emotional and affective manipulation. And that’s something I’m completely incapable of.
It seems you ask your loved ones for their opinion before accepting a project…
Sometimes I talk to my brother Guillaume, because he’s in the same profession and he understands. But less and less, because I’m learning to trust myself more. There are no rules for forging your own path, and it’s not another actor, a mother, or a father who can know which direction to take today.
You have over ten years of experience in the industry. What can we wish you for the next ten years?
Simply to keep working, because this profession is fragile, but also to continue collaborating with different people. I think it’s fantastic to be in a very mainstream entertainment show like Cat’s Eyes, for which I just finished filming the second season, and in a more intimate series like Désenchantées.
Original French article at programme-television.org
