Dominique Besnehard spent twenty-two years as a talent agent and turned the job into Call My Agent, a comedy that knows exactly how the business works and likes it too much to hurt it. That fondness is its warmth and its limit.
Fi1m perspective
Every week a real French actor walks into a Paris office playing themselves, and four agents lie to them for a living. That is the whole engine of Call My Agent (2015), and it runs for four seasons of six episodes without seizing up. The stars are vain, frightened, ageing or all three; the agents are worse, and paid ten per cent for it. Dominique Besnehard did not so much invent this as remember it.
He began in 1975 as assistant and casting director to Jacques Doillon, and spent the following years finding actors before anyone else had, Béatrice Dalle and Juliette Binoche among them. In 1986 he joined Artmedia and represented French stars for twenty-two years, which is where the series comes from. He left around 2007 or 2008, founded Mon Voisin Productions with Michel Feller, and then spent seven years trying to persuade a broadcaster that a comedy about agents was worth making. He has said that most of the storylines around the talent did really happen, but not to the guests in the series, and you can feel it. The panics are too particular to have been made up.
What he brought was the setting and the knowledge; what made it good was Fanny Herrero, who wrote it, and Camille Cottin, who plays the agent you start watching for. Besnehard's contribution is that the pressures, the client relationships and the deals all look like work rather than like a writer's idea of work. We came for the cameos, expecting to tire of them, and instead found by the end of the first season that we minded far more about the agents than about anyone they represented. That is the show's quiet trick, and it is plainly Besnehard's doing. He was one.
The limit is the same as the source. Besnehard loved the business for twenty-two years and evidently still does; he still produces, still runs a festival in Angoulême, still turns up on screen now and then. So the series is accurate about the vanity of actors and never once suggests that the machinery around them might be rotten. Our review put it plainly: it is fond of the business it mocks, which keeps it warm and stops it drawing blood. A former agent who wanted to draw blood would have written a different show, and would probably still be waiting for someone to make it.
Since then he has co-written a history of the agency itself, Artmedia: Une Histoire Du Cinéma Français (2021). The series is the affectionate version of that story. If there is a harder one, he is the only person who knows it.
Biography
Dominique Besnehard is a French actor, producer, casting director and former talent agent. Born on 5 February 1954 in Bois-Colombes, he trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre (ENSATT) in Paris.
He began working in film in 1975 as an assistant to director Jacques Doillon and became a casting director, discovering actors including Béatrice Dalle and Juliette Binoche. He later spent over twenty years as an agent at Artmedia, representing stars such as Isabelle Adjani, Sophie Marceau and Nathalie Baye, before founding his production company Mon Voisin Productions in 2008.
Besnehard originated the idea for the series Call My Agent! (2015–2020), on which he is credited as producer, and has appeared in more than eighty films and television shows since 1975, including À nos amours (1983), Betty Blue (1986), Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002) and The Crime Is Mine (2023).
