People: Up to speed in a racy role

MacLean's Magazine, December 7, 1998

It was 1980, and Charlotte Laurier was only 12, when she first splashed onto the big screen with a starring role­as Manon, the precocious and fiercely possessive daughter in Francis Mankiewicz's Quebec classic Les bons débarras (Good Riddance). Now, Laurier is 31, and another Manon­Montreal writer-director Manon Briand­has handed her the most challenging role of her career. In 2 Seconds, Briand's feature debut, she plays Laurie, a professional mountain-bike racer who gets fired from her team and becomes a bike courier in downtown Montreal. The actress, who had not ridden a bicycle since her teens, underwent 10 weeks of intensive training for the shoot. In the film, she cycles down stairs and weaves through heavy traffic. "I don't like danger, " she says, "but I had to develop a taste for it. I began to enjoy the risk­those moments of temptation in traffic­and just the speed, and the strength that you didn't know you had."

Briand, 34 and an avid cyclist herself, says she wanted Laurier "to feel the freedom you get on a bicycle, that feeling of being stoned on adrenaline." Laurier wore no makeup and submitted to the unflattering gaze of wide-angle lenses. "For a woman to be filmed that way is very brave," notes Briand. "I wanted to make her look almost like an insect, like a bee." But Laurier says her greatest challenge was getting inside the head of her character, who is physically wild but emotionally timid. Laurier, who took off her clothes for a crowd of several hundred men in Pierre Falardeau's Le Party (1989), found it easier to play a stripper than a circumspect cyclist. "The stripper was passionate and dramatic," she says, "and so am I."

But in a skin-tight racer's costume, she looked convincing: filming scenes against the backdrop of a mountain-bike race at Mammoth Mountain, Calif., she was thrilled to be mistaken for a champion by fans, who demanded autographs. Laurier, who has just started to learn English, is unknown in Hollywood, but she has now had a brush with fame, California- style.
 


 
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