Before knowing her name, you had surely already encountered the round face and gentle eyes of the one who plays Sam Berger, the HPI communicator and very anxious of Fever. The first time was in 2000, in the film Saint-Cyr, under the direction of Patricia Mazuy. Having left to act as an extra, the kid returned from the casting with a main role.
About twenty years and a string of short films later, Nina Meurisse, meanwhile trained at the Studio-théâtre d’Asnières (Hauts-de-Seine), reappears in a big way in Camille (2019), the film by Boris Lojkine in which she plays the young photojournalist Camille Lepage, killed in the Central African Republic in 2014. She reveals her earthy presence and her frank temperament, the opposite of the stereotype of the young French actress a bit ethereal. Since then, the 35-year-old hasn’t stopped.
She is the backbone of Fever, an incandescent series, signed Canal+, on the identity and political divides in French society. The actress grasped without trembling the kilometers of dialogue that Eric Benzekri, who was the creator of the Canal+ series Black Baron, wrote for her character – a challenge for her hard-working temperament, who has retained a taste for deciphering and rehearsing from her years in music class.
“Learning the text was essential for me, because when Sam says something, she is already thinking of the next sentence.explains the actress in a café, near the Gare du Nord, which allows her to connect Paris from the Seine-et-Marnaise suburbs, where she has settled. I love this preparation work, but it’s a shame because we have less and less time to do it. »
Sense of collective
To build the role of Sam, Nina Meurisse met crisis communications professionals and discovered the work “all in immediacy” agencies. On the advice of director Ziad Doueiri, with whom she had already worked on the series Black heartsshe saw again The Social Network (2010), by Aaron Sorkin, creator ofTo the White Housewhose art of walk and talk greatly irrigates the work of Eric Benzekri.
In order to avoid bringing her character too close to the Carrie Mathison of Homelandthe actress instead went to look towards Take Shelter (2011), the beautiful fantastical-paranoid film by Jeff Nichols. On the other hand, she admits to having let go of everything that relates to pure and hard politics. “I come from a very committed family, very, very left-wing, where discussions end in fistfights. I have always voted, I have always demonstrated, but today, I act more at my level, I do my part. »
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