In an interview given, Tuesday, May 12, to the media The Candy, the actress of Love and the Forests revealed that she had already been harassed and followed by overly insistent admirers.
In Parallel storiesthe new film by Ashgar Farhadi in the running for the Palme d’Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Virginie Efira plays the role of Nita, a noisemaker spied on by Sylvie, a writer lacking inspiration played by Isabelle Huppert.
The Franco-Belgian actress had no difficulty slipping into the skin of this character who was constantly followed and observed since she herself had already lived this unpleasant experience. “It happened to me several times,” she confided this Tuesday, May 12 in a new interview with the media The Candy, with his screen partner Isabelle Huppert.
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“It’s still a bit impressiveâ€
The actress then recounted having already found herself face to face with an obsessive admirer who was waiting for her outside her home. “It’s not necessarily dangerous, but it’s always a little impressive,” she assures.
“I have nothing against you but it’s weird”
A few years ago, she still had the feeling of experiencing scenes straight out of films. “I have memories of cars following me,” she tells Cookiesunder the frightened eyes of Isabelle Huppert, who, for her part, has never been confronted with this kind of situation: “I have already received letters or things like that, but it’s not espionage.”
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Virginie Efira has already spoken to some of her harassers to try to understand them, and above all to dissuade them from following her again. “I told them: “In fact, to have a relationship, there have to be two of us. (…) I have nothing against you, but it’s weird,” she remembers. Today, the actress is no longer a “stalker”: “I had a good period like that but it’s true that it went back a little bit.”
Under police protection
Already in 2017, she revealed in the pages of the magazine Society To have been harassed for eight years by a man, a “crazy man”, who waited for her outside her house, wrote her letters and even signed her up for funeral insurance. “He called my father, a doctor at the hospital, and he went so far as to see my mother in the South of France,” she explained. Virginie Efira, who did not wish to file a complaint, ended up asking to be placed under police protection after learning that her admirer was distributing leaflets on which her address appeared, to passers-by in the Les Halles district of Paris. “There are people who are not doing very well. It is also a disease. It was disturbing when it bothered people other than me,” she put it into perspective, still in 2017, at the microphone of Philippe Vandel on France Inter.
At the time of the events, Virginie Efira was not yet an actress but a TV presenter at the helm of the TV show “Nouvelle Star” on M6 (from 2006 to 2008). “At that time, I received a number of letters that was beyond belief. (…) It’s more television that does that. Today, no one follows me anymore. No one cares,” she concluded with humor and relief.
