“It was not heard at all”: Sophie Marceau recalls the day she tried to denounce the inappropriate behavior of Gérard Depardieu when she was only 18 years old

In 1985, when Sophie Marceau joined the cast of Maurice Pialat's film Police, she was 18 years old and had been revealed 5 years earlier in La Boum. But on this shoot, the young actress must opposite Gérard Depardieu. If the two artists had already toured together in Fort Saganne, by Alain Corneau, a year earlier, their reunion did not take place under the best auspices. Invited on the set of “C à Vous” on the occasion of the release of her book, Warszawa, the French actress agreed to discuss this delicate shoot again, claiming to have seen Gérard Depardieu behave like a predator with her. “I had already toured with him before and it went really well. And I knew he would be… Well, I thought he would be my protector because everyone said: “(Maurice) Pialat, be careful, he’s an ogre!”,” she explained. “It went pretty well with Pialat, by the way. But Gérard was not in the same predispositions, we will say.

According to her, something on this shoot must have annoyed the actor who was convicted in 2025 for sexual assault. “Maybe because things were going well with Pialat, it made him uncomfortable. I don't know. In any case, it didn’t go very well,” she explained. “I arrived with my big clogs. Say: "No, I don't like it, people don't talk to me like that. I didn't sign to be insulted or groped or I don't know what." It shocked me, I was actually just starting out, I didn’t understand these ways.”

“It was so established as a principle”

At the time, Sophie Marceau was already trying to denounce the inappropriate behavior of Gérard Depardieu. On the set of “C à Vous” she said she warned the film teams and the director. “I didn’t realize that it was so established as a principle, what, in cinema, it’s like that,” she explained. “So that wasn’t heard at all. And it even annoyed many. And I even think that it blacklisted me a bit from auteur cinema. Because, from the moment we feel that a person is not ready for everything, it annoys them.”