The backstage farce “La Comédie-Française” took a well-deserved bow as the opener at this year’s Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris — an auspicious spotlight for a project not originally meant to be a film.
Sold by Charades, the crowd-pleasing feature began as a pandemic-era mashup between two digital-native sketch comedians and France’s most venerable arts institution, founded by royal decree of Louis XIV.
“During COVID, the Comédie-Française launched its YouTube channel and saw that many people were tuning in to online theater,” says co-director Bertrand Usclat. “That sparked the idea of branching into digital formats. They approached us to create short sketches and social-media vignettes to show a different side.”
Usclat and his collaborators loved the concept — but quickly realized the format didn’t fit.
“Honestly, theater and social media don’t make for a very happy marriage,” Usclat admits. “Filming theater is always tricky, whether with a camera or a phone. So we came back with a counterproposal: ‘Short clips aren’t the right format. But what about a TV series, something in the vein of ‘Call My Agent!,’ where each member of the Comédie-Française plays themselves? We could tell the behind-the-scenes story of the institution and show life on the other side of the curtain — what everyday life is like for these people in a place that is anything but.’”
Soon, Usclat and his collaborators Martin Darondeau and Pauline Clément — herself a popular sketch comic and member of the historic troupe — won over both the Comédie-Française and producers Mathieu and Thomas Verhaegh. Finding a broadcaster, however, proved far more challenging.
“We wrote the series for over a year and were very happy with the result, but after pitching it to all the French TV channels, everyone said no,” Usclat recalls. “We ended up with a project we believed in deeply, but that nobody wanted.”
Then an opening appeared: a five-day window in June 2025 when the theater’s main stage would be free during the daytime. Such an opportunity might not present itself for years — perhaps even decades. They couldn’t let it slip.
By February, the team was off to the races. Usclat, Darondeau, Clément, and Clémence Dargent reworked the series into a 70-page script, while producers Mathieu and Thomas Verhaegh leveraged the success of a previous feature — Quentin Dupieux’s “Yannick,” which also took place in a single theater — to secure full financing in a whirlwind two weeks. Next came convincing the theater’s governing body.
“There’s a whole internal political process at the Comédie-Française, and we had to persuade the actors’ society to accept a project they couldn’t read, simply because it hadn’t been written yet,” laughs co-director Martin Darondeau. “[The administrator] Éric Ruf argued that all actors on the governing committee had once been trusted in similar situations, so now they should trust Pauline [who’s one their own]. It was a pure bluff!”
And it worked. The project would shoot for 15 days in June 2025, taking advantage of unprecedented access — provided they could adhere to protocols in place for centuries.
“We had to respect the Comédie-Française timetable,” Darondeau explains. “The main stage is taken over by the stage managers every day at 5 p.m., so we had to stop filming at that exact time. On the first day, we thought we could go half an hour over, like on most shoots. At 5 p.m. sharp, the Comédie-Française stage managers walked onto the set and said: ‘No, you didn’t understand. Everything is timed down to the minute.’ That forced us into extreme discipline and total concentration.”
The film itself is far looser — an opening-night farce where everything that can go wrong does in the three hours before curtain up. That the play is “Macbeth” — and that no one bothers with the superstition around naming it — underscores the filmmakers’ winking, prankster approach.
“The film had to be accessible,” says Darondeau. “We wanted it to make anyone laugh, whether or not they go to the theater or know the Comédie-Française. Shakespeare shouldn’t feel intimidating—historically, his plays were loud and chaotic, with drunk spectators and prostitutes in the audience. And Molière wasn’t a fixed text; it changed every night. Today, these works are treated as elite, but that’s really just a matter of presentation.”
The filmmakers apply the same thinking to the cultural canon itself.
“Comedy is often seen as less noble, more chaotic,” says Usclat. “But farce is actually highly precise. Setups, payoffs, and callbacks follow a strict logic, much like theater itself — nothing can break down, and even accidents have to be planned. That’s why comic mechanics are timeless: they’re built to make everyone laugh.”