Rugby World Cup 2023 – “I do everything Galthié tells me!” : actor Fabrice Luchini recounts his meeting with the coach of the XV of France
A stranger to sports for a large part of his life, actor and storyteller Fabrice Luchini has found himself curious about rugby in recent months. An interest born from a meeting with the coach Fabien Galthié, in Monaco, through the starred chef Yannick Alléno. He tells.
It’s not yet something he has mastered frankly and, without pretense, Fabrice Luchini talks about his naivety to rugby at the same time as he admits a certain fascination, almost magnetic. As we would pose as a layman in front of an abstract painting, of which we ignore both the fundamental meaning and the subtleties of the message, and which we would be content to find beautiful. In all subjectivity. “I’m the most pitiful sports fan, I don’t know anything about it. […] I spend my time watching sports. And since I don’t understand anything about it…” he asserts after a long parallel with Charles Bovary, erased hero of Flaubert’s work Madame Bovary.
He recounts this unfulfilled interest this Sunday in the columns of The team. A long interview in which he returns in particular to his new interest in rugby. His curiosity was born from a meeting with Fabien Galthié, a year ago in Monaco and at the initiative of three-star chef Yannick Alléno. Luchini remembers: “Suddenly he said to me: “Do you know who Fabien Galthié is?” I’m unsure of my bases. Fabien Galthié, I had a vague idea of who he was, but not deeply embodied. And there he adds: “I have to introduce it to you, I want it.”“
“It’s going to be a disaster for the French team”
The meeting therefore happens, fortuitously, improvised. And Galthié, who we know has a certain attraction for philosophical things, visibly hits the mark. “Galthié arrives and tells me, with incredible warmth – and if I allow myself to say it, it’s because it’s all true: “Fabrice, do you know what I do certain days before matches? I pull out your Instagrams and put them, for example, Word by Victor Hugo: “Be careful of the things you say. Everything can come out of a word that you lose in passing. Everything, hatred and mourning…” I answer him : “You don’t do something like that before playing? It’s going to be a disaster for the France team now.”“
This text, Word by Victor Hugo, Galthié had already partially declaimed it in an interview given to Midi Olympique in March 2022 and the day after the Grand Slam of the Blues in the 6 Nations Tournament. Through this, the coach wanted to respond to his detractors, at one time numerous, around the “pierced bubble” of Marcoussis during the Covid episode (2021 6 Nations Tournament). “I heard so many things at that time. It was almost fiction. I know who said what… And why they said it… Even you said things… It doesn’t matter now. When, after this episode, I took over the team, I read, as a response, a quote from Victor Hugo to my players.” He was already declaiming, Word by Victor Hugo.
“Dupont, it seems that he has no bling-bling”
Still during this interview, Luchini pauses for a moment on the Antoine Dupont case. “On would say he has no bling-bling. Dupont is Dupont. Completely normal physique… and he becomes a myth.” A mythological scope specific to sporting passions and which Luchini seems to look at with admiration. “I’m asking idiotic questions. Why am I happy when I attract 700 people every night at the Montparnasse theater? And why do they attract 50,000 in a single evening? I have nothing to do with it. Another thing to say: 700 on one side, 50,000 on the other. We are rats, toddlers. Well-known, not-known film actors… rats!” Frank of the collar. He’s a regular. Before concluding, to the mention of a possible invitation from the coach for the World Cup final. “I do everything Galthié tells me!”
