Gosling and Roberts suggested to play Macron and wife in new TV drama
Ryan Gosling and Julia Roberts have been suggested to play Emmanuel Macron and his wife in a television dramatisation of their relationship, which began while she was his teacher at secondary school.
France’s oldest film producer, Gaumont, announced that it was making an unauthorised six-part drama of the president’s relationship with his wife.
Brigitte, une Femme Libre – or Brigitte, a Free Woman – has yet to be cast, but during a discussion about the production on the network BFM TV, Roselyne Bachelot, France’s former culture minister, suggested the actors who she would like to see play the roles.
“Right away, I thought of Ryan Gosling, because I find there’s a physical resemblance between Emmanuel Macron and Ryan Gosling,” she said. “And I also thought of Julia Roberts.”
Gaumont has not released a date when the series will be screened, but said that it was working on a drama that would trace the “storybook” arc of Mr and Mrs Macron’s relationship.
It will be written by the French screenwriters Bénédicte Charles and Olivier Pouponneau, and each episode will be 45 minutes long.
“Brigitte Macron is a fascinating character, we wanted to approach her in a romantic, almost melodramatic way, because of the romantic breath of her destiny,” Ms Charles said in an interview with Le Figaro.
The Elysée has said they are not involved in the project and that they learned about it from the press.
The story will start in 1992, when the 15-year-old Mr Macron met his wife-to-be, who was 39 at the time, at a theatre workshop, and take viewers up to the present day.
Mr Macron was 29 and Mrs Macron 54 when they married in 2007. Ten years later, he became president.
The private life of a sitting head of state is typically off limits in French television and cinema, and Ms Bachelot said that she felt uncomfortable with the idea.
However, she admitted that if the drama does air, she will be one of the first to watch it.
At the suggestion of Gosling being offered the role, another pundit joked that the series should be called Bla-Bla Land, a reference to Gosling’s 2017 movie La La Land.
Mrs Macron was a married drama teacher at a Catholic Providence school in Amiens when she met the future president.
Their relationship sparked controversy in the provincial northern French city and led to Mr Macron’s parents, both doctors, sending him to board in Paris for his sixth-form studies.
In 2006, Mrs Macron divorced from her estranged husband, André-Louis Auzière, a banker, and married Mr Macron a year later.
