“Star Academy” 2022: who is Louis, the Lot-et-Garonne candidate?

Vintage influences

“I see this adventure as an opportunity to learn in all areas”, explains Louis, who will follow alongside the twelve others selected singing, dance, theater and stage expression lessons for six weeks. During the casting organized in Paris, where each candidate had to present a French song, an international song and a dance number, Louis drew on the repertoire of Eddy De Pretto, Phil Collins and Stromae. “Musically, I take a bit of everything”, sums up the one who grew up listening to voices from another time: ballads by Jean-Jacques Goldman, Francis Cabrel or Céline Dion. “As for French song, I listen to things discovered with my parents, so it’s quite vintage! “, he jokes while citing the Americans Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga, or Taylor Swift among his international influences. The cast of this new season includes mainly French-speaking artists: Juliette Armanet, Amir, Slimane, Véronique Sanson, Michel Polnareff, Gims, Dadju, Naps, Soprano, Pomme, Mika, Adé, Julien Clerc… Louis envisions “like an incredible dream » a duet with the septuagenarian with the characteristic vibrato, Véronique Sanson.

Proud of “his corner”

“When you come from my area, you don’t think you can have access to this type of somewhat unusual opportunity. In his early twenties, Louis sees his television experience as an opportunity to prove to his peers “that going to town and succeeding” is possible, and that Paris is not just for Parisians. “I have always evolved in my countryside, and I admit that taking the train alone for the capital with my suitcases was a surprising experience”, confides the one who, after having attended college and high school in Monflanquin and Fumel, never never went beyond Bordeaux, where he studied in the faculty of psychology. But since he successfully completed the selection steps towards the Château de Dammarie-les-Lys, an emblematic filming location for previous seasons located in Seine-et-Marne, Louis has stopped worrying. “I now see it as a challenge, a great opportunity to learn and get out of my comfort zone, of my campaign, it will make me grow,” he judges.

Stop the clichés

Concerning the organization of his time on site and the constraints imposed by the production – no Internet, telephone limited to one minute of call per day –, the candidate says he is completely at ease. And calls on anyone who wants to hear it to come out of the clichés attached to Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2010), often described as “hyperconnected”: “For me, it’s going to be super easy to detach myself from my phone, I don’t apprehend at all. I don’t need to hear from my loved ones all the time to feel good. »

The addiction of young people to their screens is not the only prejudice that the Lot-et-Garonnais hopes to fight. In this sense, his inclination for singer Eddy de Pretto, whose lyrics plead for gender fluidity and better treatment of the homosexual community in France, is not insignificant. “I chose to sing ”Kid” because I think we have to deconstruct a lot of things in our society, assesses Louis. In this piece, it is about toxic masculinity but there is also work to be done in favor of the emancipation of women, and the perception of men as necessarily virile, strong, authoritarian, blocks this progress. From tonight, Louis will sing with the hope of “bringing nuance, conveying messages” and, of course, “entertaining”.