Now the Flemish actor is starring in De helaasheid der dingen (The Misfortunates), playing the most famous alcoholic of contemporary Flemish literature.
“If I’ve been typecast, that’s ok with me,” says De Graeve, as jovial and laid back in person as he is on screen. “In the theatre, I work with different collectives, and we always choose what we want to play; so I’ve already played a variety of roles. In movies, if the story is good and the typecasting is correct, and that’s the way my life is going to be, that’s ok.”
The 37-year-old has hit the jackpot with his role as Marcel “Celle” Strobbe in De helaasheid, directed by Felix van Groeningen (who also made Dagen zonder lief). Based on the bestselling, autobiographical novel by Dimitri Verhulst, the film recounts in vivid detail the childhood of the author, who grew up with his drunken, unstable father and three very similar uncles in a small town outside Aalst in East Flanders.
De Graeve plays the father, a role that was expanded for the film. Like nearly everyone else in Flanders, he read the book when it was published in 2006. “I was very touched by it,” he says. “It’s very funny and very raw. Verhulst describes basic experiences with this swollen kind of language – almost bombastic. It’s a great book.”
It’s also a great film. Since opening last week in Belgium, it has garnered praise from critics across the country and abroad and is Belgium’s official entry for consideration for an Academy Award nomination. The Flanders International Film Festival, the largest film festival in the country, used its early reputation and star power to sell out its opening night on 6 October – held unusually in two locations to accommodate the crowd of 2,800.
“The feeling among all of us is electric,” says De Graeve, who plays alongside an exceptional ensemble cast, including Bert Haelvoet (Man zkt vrouw, Flikken) and Johan Heldenbergh (Aanrijding in Moscou, Jes). “We’ve been to Cannes, our producer just came back from Toronto; we’ve been selected for the Oscars…where is this going to stop?”
This sense of excitement has actually been with De Graeve since shooting began in and around Aalst. “I was born in Aalst and lived there until I was 20,” he explains. “So I play in my own dialect. My father and uncle came to visit the set several times, and I saw a lot of old friends who came by or who even played extras. So everyone has really been looking forward to the movie.”
Although it may not seem like a compliment, the character of Celle fits De Graeve like a glove. Not only is he simply an actor capable of embodying a confused, angry man drinking himself to death, he remembers them first hand. De Graeve grew up in a tiny village outside Aalst just next to the one where Verhulst could be found, where his parents owned a neighbourhood cafe, just like the ones seen in the film. “Our place was full of…alcoholics. So I saw a lot of the kinds of characters that I read about in the book. I saw them in my memory, sitting at the bar.”
He was able to cull from those memories to play the part of Celle – a sometimes drunkenly cheery, then suddenly violent man, who tries very hard to pull himself together once the custody of his child comes into question. “It’s tragic for the father,” says De Graeve. “His brothers pull him back into the hell that he just tried to leave. And he is not strong enough to resist.”
De helaasheid was the first time De Graeve ever worked so closely with someone as young as 13. Kenneth Vanbaeden, the boy who plays his son, had no acting experience whatsoever, but he showed up for the audition. “Pretty quickly, we saw that he was the one,” says De Graeve. “We really took him under our wings – to help with the more brutal scenes but also because he’s just a charming young man.”
The cast of seasoned actors, in fact, had fun watching Vanbaeden play the part. “We are always trying to ‘stop acting’, but for him, he doesn’t know what it’s like to begin acting.”
Meeting De Graeve, it’s almost a relief to see him looking healthy and trim (he gained weight for his role in the TV series Van vlees en bloed and kept it on for the filming of De helaasheid). If you only knew him from this latest role, you would never recognise him. “Every day, I had a wig and a moustache glued on, and that transformation always made me secure in the fact that I was getting older and droopier. I was always trying to feel the pain, trying to get myself into a fatalistic state. When I noticed sometimes in the mirror that it worked visually, I knew that my imagination could do the rest.”
www.dehelaasheidderdingen.be