- Jean-Hugues Anglade, 37°2 le matin (Betty Blue), France-Italy, 1985. Short-listed because he spoke English. But the role of Zorg – opposite the titular Béatrice Dalle – required rather more than that. “But we can’t have a guy who roller-skates in the metro,” Jean-Jacques Beineix said about J-HA’s scene-stealing Subway cameo – his as Beineix’s way of trying to bypass a Besson discovery. Bonnaffé won Godard’s Prenom: Carmen, instead. And a lot of good it did him. Not.
- Bruno Putzulu, Eloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love), France-Switzerland, 2000. The ever bilious Jean-Luc Godard’s scenario went through four versions in trying, as Chicago crtiic Roger Ebert suggested, to “reconstruct an ideal film that might once have existed in his mind, but is there no more.” JLG shots tests in February 1997 with Bonnaffe, his 1983 find for Prénom Carmen, and Bérangere Allaux until they fled his “fourth first film” (!) because of certain thoroughly humiliating scenes. Planned over five years, the “comeback” flopped.
Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls: 2