If Virginie Fortin had been told a few years ago that she would be offered on a silver platter one of the main roles in a romantic comedy, the actress and comedian would certainly have thought it was a joke. Yet that’s what happened with the Christmas movie, December 23.
• Read also: Holiday madness at the heart of a film by India Desjardins
It was the ideator and screenwriter of the feature film, India Desjardins, who thought of her when writing the screenplay for December 23a choral film directed by Miryam Bouchard (My own circus) which follows the adventures of several characters in parallel, on the eve of Christmas Eve. The author wanted to entrust one of the main roles in her film to Virginie Fortin, because she says she shares the same style of humor as her.
“I mightn’t believe that people thought of me like that, without even asking me to audition,” says the 36-year-old actress, in an interview with the Journal.
“I was super flattered that India found herself in my humor. It’s true that we have a lot of chemistry, her and me. I think we agree on a lot of opinions, feminists for example. Reading the script, I found that there were a lot of turns of phrase that I might say. There is also in my character a kind of awkwardness with which I might identify. Like me, she plays down a lot with humor and she makes small jokes to advance socially.
It is therefore no coincidence that the character of Elsa, portrayed by Virginie Fortin in December 23, shares several points in common with India Desjardins. Elsa, an author of children’s novels, is a kind of alter ego of the screenwriter.
“The goal, on the other hand, was not to make an imitation of India, nuance Virginie Fortin. The great power of fiction is that you get inspired a bit by reality and then it becomes something else. In India’s writing, it was already clear, on paper, who this girl was. It’s not quite India and it’s not quite me. It’s a happy mix of the two. It didn’t take a lot of compositional work.
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Even though this is her first film role, Virginie Fortin had already accumulated a lot of filming experience by playing alongside Évelyne Brochu in the three seasons of the series. Too. She does not hide, however, that the means deployed on a film set have impressed her.
“I already knew that we had no more time when we were shooting for the cinema, she relates. I noticed it the day I thought I would finish early because there was just one scene on my schedule. But in the end, when I arrived on set, I discovered that we were going to spend the whole day shooting that scene! It’s also fun to be able to close a section of rue Sainte-Catherine for an entire morning to film a scene. I saw the little tick more than there is at the cinema. I felt a little in Hollywood!”
The film December 23 opens November 25.
