#Difficult #beginnings #JeanLuc #Lemoine #despair #parents
At the controls of a team ready to face Father Fourras this Saturday, August 13, 2022 at “Fort Boyard”, Jean-Luc Lemoine is now a well-known and renowned presenter and comedian. But this has not always been the case. At the beginning of his career, his future worried his parents a lot.
Whether as a comedian, actor, television or radio announcer or even as a columnist for the program “Touche pas à mon poste”, Jean-Luc Lemoine is now considered a figure in the French audiovisual scene. But while he celebrated his 52nd birthday in 2022, the latter hasn’t always been as successful as we know it today.
Video. Jean-Luc Lemoine: why his parents waited ten years before going on stage
A stalled career at its beginning
Like many young aspiring actors and comedians, Jean-Luc Lemoine got off to a lukewarm start, punctuated by a few hits that made him want to continue down this path, while encountering enough hardships that he didn’t make a good living. . As a result, in the mid-1990s, his parents decided to give him an ultimatum: “I was not subject to taxes, it was my parents’ desperation and they asked me to pass an administrative contest that I approved to please them and unfortunately I succeeded. Overnight I found myself director of a leisure center in the city of Paris,” he told the France Info antenna, on the “Everything and its opposite” program. It must be said that his parents did not really believe in his success, as he confesses to the Parents d’abord de Télé-Loisirs podcast: “When I started doing this job, my parents were more like telling me: ‘You’re wasting your time, you’ll never get there’ instead of cheering me on. It’s hard when you start something and feel like you’re the only one who believes in it.”
He also recalls a particularly humiliating anecdote: “My mother is always the one with the best shots. I remember going to the market one day with her and my sister. She ran into someone who said, ‘What are your kids doing?’ She answers: ‘My daughter is an English teacher. And he, nothing…’. It was completely abstract for them. I think it was something beyond them. It took 10 years for them to come see me on stage. For the first 10 years, I actually did that in my corner without them coming. This work became concrete for them when I joined Laurent Ruquier’s team. Suddenly, there was media visibility.“
The comedian does not hide it: “Before doing Laurent Ruquier, I was not subject to taxes for ten years. Comedians are not only lazy, they are also unemployed. Sometimes I acted in front of three people, including two I knew. But that’s the reality of comedians. We learn and we know if we’re there for the right reasons. The live performance is an exchange.”
His tirade against criticism of intermittent workers
Today, Jean-Luc Lemoine is one of the “lucky ones” in his profession, those who manage to live from their work. But he also experienced moments of doubt, as he confided to Closer a few years ago: “When you’ve been working for ten years without living economically, you tell yourself that it’s still a very fragile job.” From very early on he made the decision to fight to get ahead: “I’m very rational and rational, quite a ‘control freak’. I need to calm down. The only thing that allows me to survive in this is to go for it.” I am a hard worker. I roll up my sleeves, because if, at some point, it has to stop, I don’t want to tell myself that I haven’t worked hard enough.”
But if there is something that he no longer tolerates, it is criticism of the system of intermittent entertainment workers, often accused of laziness by people who do not know much about the subject: “We always hire intermittent workers to profit from the system, but the reality is that most do not reach the number of hours to benefit from the system”.
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