There are anecdotes from the set that make you smile long after you hear them. The one that Maïtena Biraben tells about Johnny Hallyday is definitely one of them. The former host of Supplement on Canal+ is the guest of Éric Dussart and Jade this Saturday, April 18 from 11:30 a.m. in On refait la télé on RTL.
In an exclusive extract previewed by Télé-Loisirs, she agreed to return with frankness, and a lot of humor, to the interview which undoubtedly had the most impact on her during her career.
Not because it had gone badly, but precisely because it had almost not gone well at all. The guest in question? The greatest French rocker, Johnny Hallyday. And the portrait she paints of it is as tender as it is hilarious.
A giant with half-closed eyes, Maïtena Biraben’s memory of Johnny Hallyday
Indeed, when Éric Dussart asks her which personality deserved the title of worst guest, the host does not hesitate for a single second: “Johnny Hallyday! Ah, but the thing it was. He was extraordinary,” she exclaims in this excerpt. The tone is set: this is not a settling of scores, but a delicious memory, told with the kindness of someone who has learned to accept people as they are.
Because if Maïtena Biraben describes this interview as “the moment of her life”, she recognizes that Johnny Hallyday was clearly not in the same state of mind. “He did 600,000 interviews. He arrives, he’s like that, his eyes half-closed, but really more than half-closed. He waits, he responds automatically,” she says, precisely mimicking the posture of a man who has given so many interviews that he now goes through them as if on autopilot.
However, one moment changed everything. A question from the host, the content of which she does not reveal, was enough to make the singer react. “And then his blue eye opened. There, all of a sudden you say to yourself ‘he’s actually listening to me’. There he listens to me. And right after that it closes again,” she confides with a burst of laughter before concluding: “It’s horrible. » An image that is both funny and poignant, which says a lot about what the media exercise can represent for a star of this stature, solicited for decades by all the media in the world.
A presenter at ease everywhere, except in ordinary life
However, no resentment on the part of Maïtena Biraben. “I accept people as they are. I accept life with what it brings,” she says simply. A philosophy that has been forged over the course of an atypical career and a demanding personal path. The host reveals in fact that she has never had stage fright on set, nor fear of silence, two phenomena which nevertheless paralyze many of her colleagues. “I have always been more comfortable on a TV set than anywhere in life,” she confides lucidly.
Because Maïtena Biraben publicly shared, in a video broadcast by Mesdames Média, that she was diagnosed with autism at the age of 57. “I’ve been trying to understand what’s wrong with me for 28 years now,” she explained at the time. A diagnosis received like “a bus in the face”, she says, unexpectedly violent despite the relief it may have brought.
Far from apologizing for it, she made it a key to understanding her professional trajectory: “I believe that it is precisely because I am, that I was able to have the career that I did, because I think that I asked the questions that others did not ask themselves. » The television set, a codified and predictable setting, was for her “the opposite of life”, and therefore, paradoxically, the place where she felt most like herself.
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Originally published at Almouwatin.com
