It was short but pleasant for many, if we can trust the numerous reactions from disappointed and outraged viewers: the Hôtel series ends this Thursday, March 30th, after just one season on TVA’s airwaves. We can affirm without fear of error that the public’s affection for the staff of the Hôtel Dumont was instantaneous as soon as the Hôtel settled into its Thursday evening shack last September, and has never been denied thereafter. Who said that this style of television, formerly called “téléroman”, was dead?
In an interview with Showbizz.net, Emmanuel Schwartz, interpreter of the Machiavellian — and, shall we say, very unsubtle — Guillaume Dumont admitted that he really must have planned to the end in order to take total control of the family business, which to how many of his colleagues had disappointed him at the station’s decision to remove Hotel from the program.
“These are production constraints that go beyond us. We’re disappointed because we had so much fun with the crew shooting this. In our trades that is exactly what happens; Some projects take time, others less. This isn’t the first bereavement and it won’t be the last. But the team is disappointed, we had fun together,” explained Emmanuel Schwartz, knowing full well that the audience would remain “dissatisfied” with unresolved intrigues in the final on Thursday.
Certainly the actor – who is considered by many to be one of the greatest performers of his generation, especially on stage – had to summon up an almost cartoonish game to marry the sometimes offbeat, sometimes rude, but oh-so-entertaining tone of Hôtel that sometimes approached the Soap, a spirit perfectly inherited from the production. Schwartz says he enjoyed the experience and never looked down on his character.
“It’s still not a soap novel,” he also objected. “We had to find ways to renew Guillaume’s constant disappointments, his insidiousness, manage to justify them internally, to stick to the truth. We were larger than life in “something,” and we needed to anchor it in something real. »
“Playing villains is fun!” Villains are the best characters because there are more obvious weaknesses to play with. The color palette is often stronger,” added the performer, who we’ve previously seen on the small screen in Virage, L’actor public, Too much and Let go, among others.
We are currently seeing Emmanuel Schwartz in cinemas in Francis Leclerc’s The Diver. He embodies Benjamin, a sober bartender who gives a kind of voice of wisdom to the main character Stéphane (Henri Picard), a good boy on the brink of adulthood fighting the demons of his gambling addiction and clinging to his job as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a large restaurant. Emmanuel Schwartz had read the book by Stéphane Larue from which the feature film was taken before being chosen to act in it.
“I loved Stéphane’s novel. When I read it, I wondered what else I could play in it at my age,” says the 40-year-old actor. “It’s becoming more and more common to adapt novels, whether in series or in cinemas, and I think it’s the first time I’ve been able to bring a character from a novel that I liked to the screen. It was also an opportunity to work with Francis (Leclerc) as we had never met before. It was a short shoot as I’m only in 3 scenes of the film, but it was an intense day! »
Emmanuel Schwartz, also a director, presented his first film made during the pandemic with a class of graduates from the Sainte-Thérèse theater school at the last Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma in February. Project Pigeons tells the story of a cohort of theater students (determined…) who, after a tragedy, question their relationship to art. The work is presented here and there in different rooms in Quebec.
In theater he will appear solo in The Sharing, at the Théâtre La Chapelle in Montreal in May and in La Traversée du Siècle, a performance-read-flow of excerpts from 35 titles from Michel Tremblay’s repertoire, where he walks around twenty voice actors on the Stage for… 12 hours straight! Seven performances are planned in seven different theaters in Montreal in the fall.
The ending of Hôtel, announced last November when the fiction existed for only a few weeks on TVA, has caused quite a stir since the ax fell. A petition was quickly started to save the production. Ahead of the holidays, Patrice Bélanger told us about his disappointment at seeing the series off the airwaves after just one season.
Read our loving tribute to Hotel we will no doubt miss here!
With L’Échappée also ending forever last Monday, there will be room to welcome new TVA series in the 2023-2024 season. We’re talking to you about a novelty planned for the fall that will star three great actresses.
Hotel press tour