An English ‘Call My Agent!’ again

LONDON – About five minutes into the first episode of the British remake of “Ten Percent.” hit French show “Call My Agent!“Partners and their assistants at fictional talent agency Nightingale Hart are discussing how to tell a famous actor that he looks too old for a movie role.

“I honestly can’t lie to him,” says Dan (Prasanna Puwanarajah). “No, no, no,” the other agents interrupt. “But clearly I can’t tell him the truth,” she continued, mobilizing another horrified chorus of “no”.

“This is the narrow boundary that agents have to cross every day of their lives,” said John Morton, executive producer and screenwriter who developed the series. premieres On Amazon’s Prime Video on April 28 in the UK and on Sundance Now and AMC+ on April 29 in the United States. “Relationship with reality is a fascinating act of juggling in this world,” he said. “It’s a problem that’s hardly understood outside of the industry – and even by the customers inside it – and it’s a really interesting area to have fun with.”

The connections, addictions, and emotional bonds between the four agents and their clients are just like “Call My Agent!” (French for “Dix Pour Cent”).

The series became a hit in France after its 2015 debut, but received little international attention until the coronavirus pandemic hit, when the show became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. (Turkish and Indian versions have been released, and South Korea, Italy, Malaysia, and Poland all have adaptations in development.)

Morton – award-winning writer and director British show “Twenty Twelve” and “W1A” – held its first meeting on “On Percent” in 2019, the French series still called “a cult hit with a large number of loyal followers”. “I was a huge fan and my first thought was, ‘The bar is already so high, how can you not screw that up?’ it happened. Then the bar was raised.”

Morton retained much of the structural framework of “Call My Agent!”, with the four main characters at least superficially similar to their French counterparts. Here’s tough career woman Rebecca (Lydia Leonard); a little clumsy, cute Dan; ex-guard nobleman Stella (Maggie Steed); and in this interpretation is the controlling, self-deceiving Jonathan (Jack Davenport), the son of the agency’s founder, Richard Nightingale (Jim Broadbent).

He also has a daughter, Misha (Hiftu Quasem), whom Jonathan, who takes a job as Rebecca’s assistant early in the first episode, keeps a secret. And the catnip factor of the original series continues: numerous famous actors (Kelly MacDonald, Helena Bonham Carter, Dominic West, Phoebe DynevorDavid and Jessica Oyelowo among them) star in storylines that touch on ageism, stage fright, pay equality, and (for actresses) the cost of having children.

We are very familiar so far. But after a first episode that closely followed the opening of the French series, the plots of the show slowly begin to diverge, and it begins to appeal more closely to certain preoccupations of the British cultural industry, which has greater ties to and concerns with American partnerships. and effects.

Unlike the British cultural industry, and in part due to the language factor, Morton said: “The French entertainment and creative world does not feel secondary or indebted to Hollywood and celebrates that it is not. But if you’re British and whatever you think about this industry, you feel that the mothership, the big factories, is there. It felt right to include that in the show.”

After Richard’s unexpected death, Jonathan sells his majority stake to a major American agency, which immediately sends a manager, Kirsten (Chelsey Crisp), to London to oversee Nightingale Hart. “He could be a nice guy,” Dan said hopefully. “I’ve met completely normal Americans.”

While the British team mutters “yes”, “no” or “right” while the Americans constantly tell them how excited they are, there’s plenty of humor to be had through the clash of cultures, with Morton’s trademark dry humor being the perfect vehicle. they are about the new relationship.

The English-style understatement and indirection that dominates the dialogue is a notable tonal difference from the French dramas. This is masterfully taken up in the character of Julia (Rebecca Humphries), Jonathan’s assistant who rarely says more than “yes” or “no” but manages to infuse words with a suppressed intensity that reflects his obsession with his boss.

“The French are stylish, passionate and expressive about everything,” said Davenport. “And our characters have to be professionally overexpressed. But personally, they are not as incomprehensible as the average Englishman. We are not a culture that is encouraged to say what we think or feel.”

Morton’s writing, Puwanarajah said, reveals how quickly the characters reveal their “legs are rowing below the surface” under “yeah, yeah, I mean, maybe, go ahead.” Chekhovistically funny, real, and mismatched. We all loved French dramas, but oddly enough, he never came on set because every scene was a John Morton scene.”

Like the French series, the show uses guest stars to evoke the truth and weak points of those who seem most successful. When MacDonald’s real-life manager called to explain to the actor that he had been informed that his character was too old for a role, the agent “had a little trouble finding the right words,” MacDonald said. “I realized it was a little weird for him to say that, just like on the show, it was pretty funny.”

in an episode with married actors Jessica and David Oyelowo, the related payout parity issue and its accompanying complexities are reminded: “Your market rate is higher,” Jonathan tells David; but “Jess gave me her life!” In a joint video interview with his wife, David responds to a sentence he proposes.

“When I read the script, it made me cry,” Jessica said. “Because if you’re an actress and you have babies, you feel that career loss. It was nice that they added these personal tweaks.”

“It’s not easy to play yourself,” David said humorously. “I tried to think of myself as a character, but every time someone said ‘David and Jess’ on set, my brain was short-circuited. For a moment, the director asked me to play ‘him’ as the more wretched one, and I said, is David Oyelowo pathetic or is the character pathetic? Her husband nodded when Jessica said it was easier to separate the real and the on-screen self. “He was never asked to be pathetic,” she said.

The show gives time to these issues in the cultural workplace, but Morton said that wasn’t his primary intention. “The French did something that I admired them, something gentler and more subtle, I hope we have caught that,” he said. “There’s the kind of dysfunctional family we care about here.”

As Simon (Tim McInnerny), an aging, alcoholic actor, said to the kindly smiling Bonham Carter: “No matter how tragic one’s own life may seem, it eventually becomes funny.”