In the last episode of “Les Papillons noirs”, the character of Solange changes interpreter. The two creators, Bruno Merle and Olivier Abbou, revealed the reasons for this surprising change.
Attention, the following lines contain spoilers on the last episode of the Black Butterflies. If you don’t want to know anything, go your way!
Arte broadcasts this Thursday evening from 8:55 p.m. the last three episodes of The Black Butterfliesa dark thriller carried by Nicolas Duvauchelle and Niels Arestrup. Adrien, 40, is a writer lacking in inspiration. In order to make ends meet, he agrees to write the memoirs of Albert, a mysterious pensioner.
The man then tells him of his mad love for Solange, a young woman he met in his youth. They became a serial killer couple who raged every summer across 1970s France. However, as the story unfolds, Adrien discovers that Albert’s story is oddly linked to his own.
In episode 5, the writer indeed discovers that the man he thought was a complete stranger is actually his biological father whom he never knew. And that Solange, the woman with whom he committed many crimes, is none other than his mother, Catherine (Brigitte Catillon).
With this revelation there is a change in the story, but also in the casting since the character of Solange, played in the first 5 episodes by Alyzee Costes, change of interpreter. In episode 6, it’s now Lola Creton who slips into the skin of the character. A change that promises to destabilize more than one viewer, but which has a very logical explanation.
“The idea with Les Papillons noirs was to question the images we offer.”
“We tried to be one step ahead of the revelations over the course of the series in order to surprise viewers.”, thus explained Bruno Merle, one of the co-writers of the series during a press briefing. “The idea with Les Papillons noirs was to question the images that we offer.”
“Is this a flashback? Is this history transformed by Albert? Is what we see is the way we apprehend this story? Or is it already the fiction of the novel itself? All of this made people wonder if what they were seeing was real or not.”
A necessary change
Changing the actress for the last episode was therefore an essential choice for the two creators, who saw in this change a way of continuing the story but also of destabilizing the viewers. “If we wanted to be fair, we had no choice“, added Olivier Abbou.
“Since the beginning of the series, we show a Solange, who turns out to be Adrien’s mother. We therefore wondered if we should choose an actress who looks like her mother from the start, at the risk that the viewer will manage to guess the twist, or if we should take another actress during the first part.“
“Besides, there are no photos of this Solange. At one point, Mody asks Albert if he has any pictures of her to help him with the writing. To which he replies that there is none, and that he will have to imagine it. It was already a first hint of what was to come next. On the other hand, Adrien sees a photo of Albert on his driver’s license, which means that he will remain the same Albert until the end. The first Solange is therefore the one that Adrien imagines.”
And it is also thanks to this change of interpreter that the viewer understands that the images he has seen since the start of the series are in reality only interpretations that Adrien has made of the story.
Bruno Merle and Olivier Abbou, the two scriptwriters of the Black Butterflies, also added that this idea of changing the interpreter was not in the original script. It was during the casting that the idea came to them.
“We thought about this possibility when it came to putting faces to the characters we had created. Changing actresses was a bold gamble, but we didn’t really have a choice. If we hadn’t done that, the narrative wouldn’t have worked.”
Find the last three episodes of Les Papillons Noirs this Thursday, September 29 from 8:55 p.m. on Arte. The series is available in full until October 12 on Arte.tv. Season 1 will then be available from October 14 on Netflix.