“It was probably the most nervous I was,” says Leonard, leaning anxiously over a picnic table outside a cafeteria in east London. “Well, terrified.” She is correcting herself again. “That is, excited.” Subscribe to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a comprehensive list of our weekly highlights. Whether Leonard is really nervous, terrified, or excited – or any combination of the three – would be perfectly understandable. He is set to star in the British remake of Call My Agent !, a French comedy series that became a worldwide hit during the pandemic. The show’s protagonist, Camille Cottin – who plays the cool, acidic talent agent Andréa – graduated from domestic success with worldwide acclaim during the four series. In the UK version, renamed Ten Percent, Leonard plays Andréa, Rebecca. She also happens to be one of the French actor’s many fans – and this is her legacy that Leonard is most worried about living. “I was really in love with Camille Cottin,” she explains. As confused as she was with her Parisian counterpart, Leonard knew she had to remove all traces of Cottin from her mind, immediately removing herself from the original show, “because it’s not helpful if you’re going to approach something about him. yourself”. This was especially important as the two characters are very much cut from the same fabric: Rebecca and Andréa are both incredibly self-controlled, strong women with chaotic love life and a talent for intimidating junior staff – and very often the viewer. . . (Leonard, who is obviously nervous and prone to guessing herself, is not cut much from the same fabric: she is constantly reviewing the answers to even the most innocent questions.) To truly leave her mark as Rebecca, Leonard looked to her life for inspiration. Instead of her experiences with agents, she thought of a collection of “hard-core Soho media women” with whom she befriended through her cousin in the early ’00s. “I wore their coats when I was 24 and they were in their 30s. It was all expenses and delicious meals. ” She even worked for one of them for a while at that time, answering the phone to a media company and channeling the fuss she saw in her interpretation of Rebecca. “When I was young, you did it when you were at the front of the FHM. That was never my dream “ In fact, translating a show that felt essentially French (elegant, witty but often melodramatic and farcical) into something recognizable British was the mission of the entire Ten Percent team. They wisely hired John Morton – the writer behind the Twenty Twelve and W1A comedy series, known for their discreetly polished and heavy dialogues – to turn the sleek prototype into a workplace comedy full of dead-end horror. “We are not as cool as the French, so it’s a little weirder,” Leonard concludes. However, the United Kingdom was able to compete on the power front. The luxury version of the French version of the cameo – Juliette Binoche, Monica Bellucci, Isabelle Huppert – has been replaced by a number of big British names, such as Emma Corrin, Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West. The main cast is just as impressive, with Jim Broadbent, Jack Davenport and Maggie Steed as three of the other agents. However, the original draw of the show remains the same in both versions: there is something irresistible meta in seeing actors play agents who fight desperately, protect, advise and often manipulate other actors. And while it makes the life of an agent seem overly stressful, it’s the actors you feel most sorry for. The first two episodes of the British version depict acting as an incredibly precarious and suffocating rejection: a story involving old friends Bonham Carter and Olivia Williams who both believe they have been cast in the same role: a potentially catastrophic problem for which agents must to find a miraculous solution. Casting call Leon Leonard stars as Rebecca, with Prasanna Puwanarajah, Maggie Steed and Jack Davenport in Ten Percent, the UK Call My Agent remake! Photo: Bron Studios / Rob Youngson Leonard can certainly be related. He says he never really thinks he really has a role until he is safely on set. “And even then, you think you’ll probably be fired for at least the first week – until you have important things in the box that you know would cost them dearly to come back without you.” Less related, Leonard believes, is the plot of the first episode of the series, in which Kelly Macdonald loses a role in a Hollywood blockbuster because it looks too big. The story is almost a scene-by-scene remake of the opening episode of the French version (the bows of the story diverge later in the series), where the film star Cecil de France is almost persuaded by an agent to do cosmetic surgery to secure a part in a film. by Quentin Tarantino. Leonard says nothing like this has ever happened to her. “No, no one told me personally to make changes,” he replies quickly. Cosmetic surgery is something of a sensitive issue for Leonard – but not for the reasons one would expect. In 2017, she gave an interview to a newspaper in which she talked about her replacement by Rebecca Hall in the movie version of Frost / Nixon. (She played Frost’s partner, Caroline Cushing, in the original film, and while co-stars Michael Sheen and Frank Langella had been cast in the Hollywood adaptation, she was not.) In the track, Leonard says she auditioned for film role, but her agent was not optimistic about her chances, saying: “No, my love. This is the structure of the bones. Now, I’ll not be the one to tell you to have plastic surgery… “The article quotes Leonard’s response as follows:” I thought: well, it sounds like you’re telling me to have plastic surgery! “ That, Leonard says, was “bullshit.” Or, more precisely, a joke that he did not bring to the print retelling. Her agent was not very serious in her proposal to get her client under the knife. Leonard was “quite upset” about the interview (no surprise, since she’s still been at the same agency since she went to drama school). That’s partly why she looks so anxious and does not look like Rebecca today: she says she has been afraid to speak to reporters since that incident. (Before our meeting he went for a bath in an attempt to calm down.) Lydia Leonard… “Nobody told me personally to make any changes.” Photo: Linda Nylind / The Guardian However, is it so outrageous to think that an agent can suggest surgery to his client? It eventually happens at ten percent. Leonard thinks this is probably a thing of the past. “Let’s remember Call My Agent! “It was written in recent years,” he says. “You hear about people being told to lose weight and what else, but we hope [nowadays] that’s very inappropriate to suggest. ” (A few weeks later, Leonard asks for a phone call to clarify her thoughts on the subject. She has since spoken to her cosmetic surgery agent about the joke, who told her that although the proposal was not serious in her case, “I was absolutely encouraged to say such things to people – so it’s relevant and not as if it did not happen.”) Whatever the exact pressures of the industry on women, it is difficult to escape the fact that acting is a profession that can also be designed to make people feel as conscious as possible. “Part of the job is to have to look at yourself in the mirror for two hours every morning while someone is doing their makeup, or seeing yourself on a big screen – that’s definitely not good,” Leonard agrees. Her new tactic is to see her performances over her phone, as the small, low-quality image makes it more difficult to analyze the details. “There is a long way to go: I can understand that they have told the story well and I do not fall into the trap of looking at yourself very carefully.” Leonard is no stranger to examining herself. she does it all her life. In fact, it’s part of the reason he wanted to be an actor from the start. The original seed was sown, he believes, under its strange name. “Friends ‘parents would be like,’ Lydia Leonard! Sounds like an actress! ‘”Then there was her obsession with Winona Ryder (” I had a lot of pictures of her on my wall “). Most critical, however, was the layout of her children’s bedroom at her family home in Hampshire. “This is a bit psychotic, but I had a very large mirror in the corner of my room and I used to talk to myself in it – making faces and voices. “Very narcissistic and crazy.” The kind of arrangement that could easily boost an actor’s awareness of how you are dealing. After an initial rejection – she spent her intermediate year backpacking and working at Selfridges – Leonard took a place at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School, which has a reputation as a super-selective greenhouse for serious acting talent (alumni include Daniel Day-Lewis, Olivia Colman, Jeremy Irons and Naomi Harris). Sounds like the opportunity of a lifetime, but Leonard is very reluctant to sing the praises …
