Original subtitles

I'm playing a man who everyone already knows a lot about.

The most important thing I've always tried to do with him is to make him

The storyline of Louis is quite extreme, intense, and

a lot happens.

It's a fascinating season. I think

it's a really good season. Ambition can be an extremely poisonous thing.

And we start to feel the tension

from outside Versailles.

A lot changes.

It's a big shakedown.

Season 3 has been about elevating Louis to a position where he

starts to believe his own marketing.

La Galerie des Glaces est désormais à chauffer.

Voilà.

In the first two seasons, we could use Versailles very clearly as a sort of

metaphor for Louis' journey, but in season three, he's reached the top, and

Galerie des Glaces is the summit of his construction of himself.

There is a discovery that Philippe finds on his own.

It's a mystery to begin with, but then that becomes an adventure and it becomes

a thriller.

We wanted to compromise Bonton, so we put him in a very, very, very difficult

position.

We do feel that Bonton

has a secret that we, you as the audience, don't know.

The detective investigative story that comes with that becomes an

obsession, like an addiction.

He gets to do that with Fabien, which is a combination of characters that we

haven't really seen at all in season one or two.

It's almost like a 17th century Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, you know. I'll

let the audience decide who's Sherlock Holmes.

If he's Sherlock,

then maybe it's like Sherlock enlists Batman's help.

Fabien is fascinated because he's a cop who just likes to know what the truth

is. And we really love the idea that we could add a mystery, principally because

we found a way to make it about Louis' identity.

It's a very well -known story from this time in history.

Even though we don't know if it's a true story or not, it's a real myth.

This morning we were filming the climax of that seven -hour journey.

The big reveal of who the man in the iron mask is.

Because of the emotion and the sort of power in the storytelling of the scene,

think the important thing in the approach was to just keep it as simple

possible.

There are times when the camera has to do sort of important work in terms of

enhancing the storytelling.

There are other times when your approach can be quite observational and you want

to see the thought process of the king in the moment just leading up to the

being taken off.

He has

an amazing presence and I

think it's going to be quite...

a nice reveal for an audience to be following this journey.

So it was a very resonating sequence for the whole of this season.

The relationship between brothers is quite distant this year. It's gone from,

guess, shouting at each other with love to an understanding to now really having

each other's back.

He

has

everything he could possibly need.

But that's not enough.

Where can he go from there?

Let's see how the monster behaves.

And so all the characters that are within his orbit are forced to consider

much they want to be a part of it.

And Louis immediately recognises that he can use this for a political

manipulation.

One of the challenges that we found was to make it feel like that she's losing

control over her senses and her ability to communicate.

A concept called speaking in tongues. A spiritual body invades the

consciousness.

It's in fast patterns of words that you can't really make out the meaning of.

The way in which we shot it was that no one could see Louis' face other than

you, the audience.

It's a miracle.

He can use this event to present to the other people behind him and the rest of

the court that he has powers from God.

So this morning we were shooting a scene where Louis is sort of ordained with

God.

Extraordinary, beautiful scene to shoot and quite politically controversial for

Louis.

Okay, ready?

We live in a very different time now. It's easy for us to judge him and say he

was the devil. People believed he was God. He represented God.

So we can't necessarily blame him if he exercised the power that the people

believed in.

Cut. Good for me. Thank you.

What's been really interesting this year that we've done with the series is put

these characters in a real -world context. This year we actually get to

characters occupy Paris as a setting.

When we started to work on Season

3, we really felt that we wanted to...

Plot the seeds of the revolution.

Yes.

Jeanne is a shoemaker by trade.

She is seeing real poverty around her and she sees the

consequences of the high taxation, etc., that is coming from the side.

How to show these Parisian people not to be in a kind of cliché of too clean

characters or, on the contrary, too caricaturedly dirty, to always create

kind of modernity, this realism.

And it turned out that we were shooting in the summer.

And in the summer, because of July 14th, the Tour de France, these places were

inaccessible. So we were forced.

to choose a practical solution, to build the city ourselves, through two streets

in fact, a central square.

Here we have only built two levels, and in fact the higher levels will be

rebuilt later in post -production, that is to say in synthesis images.

You'll see the building as it was in the past.

We only have a base with a door.

But we can use special effects to put everything we want on it.

At the time, we called it the White City of Paris.

Why? Because all the facades were plastered, mainly for fire reasons.

But here, of course, we skated, we darkened the walls to try to have relief

the depths for the cinematographic needs.

In the tannery, there's just leather hanging everywhere and big pots

You can imagine the smells and that it's hot and the sweat coming off everybody.

So we get to see what it was like to live in Paris as a part of

La Peuple.

The people struggling to be able to find food to feed themselves in a muddy,

dark, dank back alley of Paris, juxtaposed with ostentatious

room ever to be created in European history, really shows

you how extreme the world is.

He has an instinct to love his people.

but he also he cannot stop himself from treating them with a certain level of

cruelty

We see what totalitarianism does

to an ordinary man.

I was 24 years old when I got the role of Louis, and I'm now 27.

And that period in anyone's life, in your mid -20s, you change so much as a

human being.

So to do that process...

whilst being the lead of a 30 million euro television production,

is a massive learning experience.

It's my last day.

That would be four years, living in Paris, playing one character.

You know, and sometimes he's been quite a tough character to play, but I've just

enjoyed every second of it.

You know,

this is our last year, and

it's heartbreaking too because we've become like family.

I don't even know how to encapsulate the experience that I've had on Versailles.

It's been the most extraordinary adventure of my life.

It's been amazing.

so much in this.

What we have tried to do with him over three seasons is evolve him from a boy

who is thrust into this position of power when his mother, Anne of Austria,

dies.

And grow him from that fragile boy into

the emblem that he is known as today, the Sun King.

He belongs to all of the French crew and everyone here in France. He is part of

French legacy.

The most challenging thing is, as an actor, wanting to take ownership of a

and sometimes it's not possible because the role is so much bigger

than what you want to do with it, if that makes sense.