New features for Fort Boyard. Returning to television in June, the cult game France 2 will undergo several modifications in its 35th season, starting with its famous little characters, Passe-muraille and Passe-partout.
Interviewed by TVMag, actor Anthony Laborde, who plays Passe-muraille, confided that both his character and that of André Boucher (alias Passe-partout) would undergo an important evolution.
“They will begin to express themselves a little more than other years. Viewers will be surprised by the evolution of the characters,” she reveals.
“There will be no big speeches”
Like Passe-muraille and Passe-partout, since Fort Boyard’s creation in 1990, many recurring characters have never spoken during the show. A way for the production to easily transpose them to foreign versions of the program, as Guillaume Ramain, artistic producer of Fort Boyard, explained to RTBF in 2021.
“Most of the characters in Fort Boyard do not speak, which allows them to be called in all versions of all countries,” he said.
And he adds “each country makes its own version of the Fort. We provide them with the ingredients, be it the games or the characters, and they create a Boyard Fort in their own style.”
Contacted by TVMag, However, Fort Boyard’s production company, Adventure Line Production, wanted to clarify this evolution of the roles of Passe-partout and Passe-muraille.
“They are not going to talk, there will be no big speeches. There have always been interactions with Olivier Minne and the participants, this year there will be some phrases,” specifies the producer.
Great development
However, these changes constitute an important advance for the program, often criticized for the “degrading” image it gives of short people.
“Little actors are relegated to the role of extras and confined to their physical appearance,” stated in 2023 the president of the Little Actors’ Association, Violette Viannay, on the handicap.fr site.
“The fact that they cannot express themselves feeds a degrading image, which is especially harmful when it comes to the way little people are viewed in public spaces,” she added.
Criticisms denied by the main actors Anthony Laborde and André Bouchet, who play Passe-muraille and Passe-partout respectively. “If I had felt exploited, I would have resigned immediately,” he confided to Sud Ouest in July 2023.
And Anthony Laborde agrees: “without my disability, I would never have had this life. “It was my strength and, ultimately, an opportunity.”
Source: BFM TV
