Roy Dupuis: A man and his desires

Monday evening. A flashy suburban cinema. Armed with only a pen and a camera, there are women waiting at the entrance. For whom? The stars of Un homme et son péché, but particularly for him, Roy Dupuis.

Appearing incognito is a distant memory for the latest performer of Alexis. Since the small screen established him as Ovila in Les Filles de Caleb – more than 3.3 million viewers – Dupuis has turned heads everywhere he goes. And this attention now extends beyond our borders.

Two weeks ago a handful of Americans made the trip to Montreal for the premiere of Un homme et son péché. To see the man himself. Surfing the Internet you find a British site dedicated to him <<Yo! – viv>> and plenty others, most often in English, that recount his feats of arms! A new twist produced by the international success of the TV series Nikita, which ate up 5 years of his life.

This success has not always had a beneficial effect on Roy Dupuis  Becoming the idol of Quebec at 26 “completely changed my life, my private life as well as my professional life,” he declares. Blanche and Scoop made it worse. Today he maintains that he’s less worried about it,  that he doesn’t try to control it. “I’m not responsible for what they do. I have never given my approval to any Internet site, there’s no official Roy Dupuis fan club,” he emphasises.

One source of embarrassment, however, in this enviable fame. He says it sincerely, without false humility : that he feels he hasn’t achieved anything particularly great so far. “I have a problem with giving myself this level of importance,” he confides. “One of the things that makes me awkward and shy when I go on a talk-show is that I feel I don’t have much to say. I don’t feel, in my own mind, that I’ve done much. And this feeling, that perhaps I don’t deserve all this, makes me act responsibly in society.

Acting responsibly, for Roy Dupuis, means for example, using his fame to benefit causes. Hence his association with Foundation Mira, his sponsoring of a river, or his ‘adoption’ of a blue whale through the Mingan Island research station. For him, acting responsibly also means not doing just anything.

Roy Dupuis could settle in Los Angeles tomorrow. He has an agent there. Numerous American offers pass through his hands. Except that he wants to lay down his suitcase. “The five years on Nikita was all travelling. I was away filming and coming back every weekend. I’d just bought my house which I’d been looking for for six years, but I saw little of it. I wanted to be living there. I also wanted to have a child, and I needed to be there. It’s currently the priority in my life. It’s simple, but that’s it.”

Settle down, yes, but not to stop everything. Quebecois projects await him. And then he also wants to bring his own interests to the screen, to make his own films (he directed an episode of Nikita).  “That’s where I am today. My conscience tells me that maybe I have things to do other than act out roles. It’s not clear, it’s just a feeling I have.”

A while ago Roy mentioned his interest in documentaries, on subjects that he still keeps to himself. For him the documentary – “I hardly watch anything else on TV” – is a way of saying something, and letting others speak too, within a structure that is “less complex than the cinema, is freer, and has a spirit of the adventurer about it, like me.” Roy Dupuis also talks about a desire to do auteur films, which he has sampled in Being at Home with Claude and Cap Tourmente.  Not out of any desire to shock or to shatter his ‘ordinary’ image. Furthermore, he says, “I’m not trying to surprise. It’s not important to me. When someone offers me a job I read the story, I meet with the director, I see whether or not we can do something together, and I let it develop. Sometimes it’s easy, a joy, like with Un homme et son péché. I believe it’s as important to tell good stories as to make films that have backers.

The round of interviews

Monday, late afternoon. It was already dark when the Un homme et son péché cavalcade took over a hotel in Quebec, for the round of interviews preceding the evening’s premiere. Roy Dupuis arrived last. “Resting,” explained the press officer, after a week of media marathons which had taken the team to Montreal, Gatineau and Saguenay.

First we were put in a corridor, amidst the hubbub of the other actors and journalists who were hanging around. No sooner had he sat down than he was up again. “Couldn’t we go somewhere else?” he asks. Somewhere else, as in: somewhere calmer in order to be able to chat in peace.

You want to chat, Roy Dupuis? Amazingly, yes. Unpretentiously, weighing his words, calmly, one might almost want to say serenely. At 39 (he’ll be 40 in April), in the bedroom where we were eventually installed, the actor radiated a sort of harmony, incompatible with the image of the hunted, wary creature that he’s often labelled as.

Dupuis found this harmony in Alexis in the screenplay of Un homme et son péché, a heroic character such as the cinema of Quebec rarely offers. So what’s he about? Long pause. “Thinking about it, yes, at last a local man who isn’t a loser. Even though he loses something, he pushes himself to the limit. He holds on to his beauty, his harmony.”

“He’s not like Ovila,” he continues, “who might have been like him, but who eventually becomes what we’re used to seeing, a man who doesn’t push himself to the limit of what he has to do, of his willpower, who never manages to express what he wants. Alexis is much more in harmony with himself. I see him as a mixture of the western and the native civilisations. He has learned to see the beauty and the richness in the wild.”

A ‘green’ before his time?

“He doesn’t see the earth as something that needs to be improved, but as already perfect in itself.”

Like just about everyone, Roy Dupuis had doubts about the project Un homme et son péché. “Why would one want to remake this story again,” he asked himself at the outset. A story that he thought he knew, a belief that was shattered by reading the screenplay – and not Claude-Henri Grignon’s novel which he hasn’t read. “It wasn’t the memory I had of the TV series, nor the story I was told when I was young. I was expecting something a lot lighter, while this was a story that was more tragic, more intense, and more profound.”

When asked what he thought the film would give to the spectator over and above the emotion, he brought the question back to himself. “I would suggest the reasons that made me take part,” he says. “For a start I found it interesting as a tale. A tale always deals with great subjects, and I find that today, in a world centred around individualism, profit, fear of others, competition, this film tells us at what point the disease of power – and the power is money – manages to kill beauty.”

Nor does he hide the fact that he has been shouted at for being Quebecois, a native of the provinces, Abitibi in this instance. “You learn things about the way in which the countryside has been thought of, about the regions, about the mistakes that have been made,” he says. “And it’s never a bad thing to know where you’ve come from, in order to be able to progress.”

“For me,” he adds, “when I say my house is important, it’s the same thing. My father was a commercial traveller. He was often transferred, from Abitibi to Ontario, to Montreal. We never had a family home. I would like my house to become my children’s home, my grand-children’s. It’s symbolic, but I think it’s important that they know where they have come from, that they have a point of attachment, a place to put down roots.”

To put down roots, in his case, in order to take off again? “I’d like to stay at home for a bit. After that, we’ll see. Obviously if someone like Jim Jarmush calls me, I won’t say no. Or David Lynch, or Lars Von Trier. The only problem,” he says with a laugh, “is that they don’t call.”