Félix Maritaud and Théodore Pellerin on giving us the drag queen love story we deserve in Solo
The pair discuss their electrifying new film set in Montreal's drag scene
Here & Queer is an interview series hosted by Peter Knegt that celebrates and amplifies the work of LGBTQ artists through unfiltered conversations.
Hot off winning the prize for the best Canadian feature film at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, Sophie Dupuis's Solo is currently sashaying its way into cinemas, bringing along its vibrant, All About Eve-style story of two rising star drag queens who begin a complicated love affair.
Those two drag queens are played by the remarkable likes of Théodore Pellerin and Félix Maritaud, and the pair of French actors (Pellerin from Quebec, Maritaud from France) stopped by the set of Here & Queer to talk to host Peter Knegt about embodying the fierceness very much on screen in Solo. Watch the full episode below:
Solo follows Simon (Pellerin), a rising star in the Montreal drag world who quickly falls in love with Olivier (Maritaud), a new arrival to the scene from France. The two begin performing together as a duo, until a toxic dynamic develops between them that threatens what Simon in particular has worked so hard to achieve.
Pellerin says that when he was a teenager, he wrote a drag part for himself in a play he was doing in school.
"I think maybe I've always been very admiring of actresses," Pellerin says."Just moved by them more so than by actors. And I think that as a man, maybe I saw drag and drag characters as the only form that I could interpret femininity. And so I think there was an element of that attraction that kind of came from that."
After shooting his previous collaboration with Dupuis, 2018's Family First (which was Canada's submission to the Academy Awards that year), Pellerin was asked by Dupuis at the wrap party if there was something in particular he really wanted to play.
"I remember saying 'a drag queen,'" Pellerin says. "So it has been part of my desire for a while, but I don't think that's what initiated her interest in the world. It was completely independent. But it's just funny that it came back years after and with her as well."
Maritaud — who had never worked with Dupuis before — jumped at the chance to join the project.
"We had lots of fun doing it," he says. "It was [full of] really joyful moments. All these meetings where we were talking about our lives, the lives of the characters, visions we had and desires we had. It was a lot of sharing and in creating a trust process that helped us. Because everybody was looked at with the the best vision. That's Sophie's strength. She can watch you at your best and you become your best in her vision. That's magic."
Solo is playing in Canadian cinemas now.
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