Julia de Nuñez (24 years old, Buenos Aires) had already been told that she looked like Brigitte Bardot. Maybe that’s why a friend of hers thought of her when she came across a call for a project about the icon of French cinema. It was 2021 and De Nuñez had not yet finished her first year at drama school. “I had not planned to present myself to castings nor make movies or anything. I thought this would be a documentary made by students, I didn’t know it was a serious project nor did I imagine the magnitude it had,” said the Franco-Argentine actress this Tuesday in a hotel in Madrid. It is very likely that her innocence and inexperience also played in her favor when it came to being selected to star. bardota six-episode French fiction series directed and written by filmmaker Danièle Thompson and her son Christopher that has been on the screen for the seven years since Brigitte Bardot made her first casting with 15 years until the success of And God created womanin 1956.
Before launching the fiction, which is broadcast in Spain by the SundanceTV channel on Thursdays (10:30 p.m.), Danièle Thompson contacted the actress, who is now 89 years old, to ask for her collaboration. In response he received a long letter in which he expressed his fatigue at continuing to arouse interest even though he retired from acting in 1973. “I want them to leave me alone, I don’t understand why everyone keeps talking about me. I stopped working in films years ago and I want to take care of my animal cause,” said Bardot. In the end, she seemed to give in: if someone was going to carry out a project about her life, she had better be a veteran like Thompson. “I can’t say she seemed excited by the idea, I really wasn’t,” Thompson told reporters.
Julia de Nuñez does not know if Brigitte Bardot has seen her performance or her opinion of her work. She also didn’t want to think too much about what it meant to play a film icon. “Maybe I’m very naive, because other actors and actresses might ask themselves, ‘Do I have the legitimacy to play this role?’ But I didn’t really ask myself, and I think that was better, because it would have been too complicated. I didn’t think about what people might think about the result until we finished the project and the series was going to come out, and thank goodness because, if not, I would have been very dizzy,” explains the actress, who answers in French although she speaks and understands the Spanish, the language of his father, the Argentine journalist Alexandre de Núñez.
The series takes advantage of the figure of Bardot to paint a portrait of love relationships and French society in the 1950s, an environment in which the actress’s desire for freedom and rebellion did not fit. By focusing on her early years, the fiction leaves aside the controversies that she was involved in later, such as describing the women who raised their voices on Me Too as “hypocritical and ridiculous” or the repeated condemnations for the racist proclamations of she.
The story begins with a teenage Brigitte who begins a relationship with the filmmaker Roger Vadim behind her parents’ back. Her first husband is played in the series by Victor Belmondo, grandson of Jean-Paul Belmondo, another icon of French cinema who coincided with Bardot in the film. famous loves (1961). Roger Vadim was the one who directed And God created womanthe title that definitively launched Bardot to stardom and where she would meet the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, with whom she would also maintain a relationship.
In what was her first job as a professional, Julia de Nuñez had a teacher who helped her prepare the role. “I had a preconceived idea of what it was like to embody a real character, I thought it was something more imitative, more superficial. We did a very extensive job of sitting down to analyze the script little by little,” she explains. That analysis was accompanied by her own documentation work by watching Bardot films and reading books about her. “Playing someone is not about interpreting a person, but about interpreting that person’s emotions. What I saw and read about her helped me get inspired and know what she was like, but those two works in parallel, with the coach and mine, were complementary.”
In the second episode of the series, her then-husband describes Brigitte Bardot in an interview: “She is an extraordinary mixture of innocence and femininity, of shamelessness and shyness.” Already in her first steps, the exuberance of the actress caught the attention of the press, which would not stop following her and from which she fled when she retired early.
For Julia de Nuñez, the figure of Bardot, one of the great sexual icons in the history of cinema, has had a great influence on today’s women. “There are many things, starting with the way she dressed. It’s not like she said, ‘I’m going to do this for women.’ She decided to live her life as she saw fit and without claiming to be a feminist, without being an activist, but they took her as an example. She also says that she didn’t want to be a mother. She gave birth to her son Nicolas (Nicolas-Jacques Charrier) in 1960, and telling journalists that she did not want to be a mother was very controversial. Today it is still a bit taboo to say that you don’t want to be a mother, but it is understood that women want to pursue other interests and it is not perceived as selfish. Just as she expressed herself and led her life, she made women understand that they also had the right to do and say what Brigitte Bardot did and said,” reflects De Nuñez.
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