In new Max series “Malditos,” leader of a Gypsy community Sara (Céline Sallette) in southern France is threatened with eviction by rising waters. To save her business and provide a future for her sons, she needs to form new alliances, and soon. Juan (Damien Bonnard) might be her best bet.
Looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, right? Wrong.
“It’s going to get worse and worse. They are enemies,” says Sallette at Canneseries, while Bonnard jokes: “And friends, just like the Capulets and the Montagues. In a way, they are exactly the same.”
Their complicated relationship is bound to get even more heated, even though they ultimately “respect” each other, argues Sallette. Bonnard disagrees: “I’m not sure if you do. You set up traps for me.”
“This is what they told us about Season 2,” she adds.
“Malditos” is produced by Mediawan-owned White Lion Films. It’s created by Jean-Charles Hue (“The Soiled Doves of Tijuana,” “Eat Your Bones”) who writes with Olivier Prieur, Maya Haffar and Dorothée Lachaud, and directs alongside Cécilia Verheyden. Warner Bros. Discovery is selling.
Pablo Cobo, Darren Muselet, Raïka Hazanavicius, Jérôme Niel and Valérie Karsenti also star.
Sara and Juan, forced to fight for their lives, have to deal with their own families as well. And a long-buried secret that’s about to resurface.
“It’s the old world. It was so interesting to enter this mindset. You could say it’s about preserving the family, but their entire system is flawed and leads to destruction. This show is about how all this violence just causes more violence. Unless you get out of it, it’s going to break you,” says Sallette.
Bonnard deadpans: “The characters we play here, we’re like mushrooms: we grow on dead things.”
French actors, known for “House of Tolerance” (Sallette) or recently spotted in “Asteroid City” and “Poor Things” (Bonnard), are no strangers to challenges. But “Malditos” set, which combined amateur performers and professional actors, required flexibility from its leads.
“It was a fucking challenge for sure. The conditions were harsh. We were always in tents. There were so many of us, all the time, and it was very, very windy. It was non-conventional, very tiring and [ultimately] very moving,” recalls Sallette.
“Yesterday I saw the show for the first time, and I found it so powerful. It’s… special. These people are fighting to survive all the time: it’s always a question of life and death. This clan, they move all the time, but this makes their existence very fragile. They are only connected to other people – they are not connected to the land.”
While their unforgiving tit-for-tat philosophy alone echoes a certain (land-obsessed) Dutton family, smash hit “Yellowstone” wasn’t exactly a reference for the team.
“I haven’t seen it – I haven’t even seen ‘Game of Thrones’,” admits Bonnard. But Western was very much on creator Jean-Charles Hue’s mind.
“He would always quote [John] Ford. He talked about the way he composed shots, and I think he was very inspired by that, by all these wide spaces and open horizons,” says Sallette.
Bonnard promises: “We have the boots.”
Canneseries