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 splashedonto the big screen with a starring role­as Manon, the precocious andfiercely possessive daughter in Francis Mankiewicz's Quebec classic Lesbons débarras (Good Riddance). Now, Laurier is 31, and another Manon­Montrealwriter-director Manon Briand­has handed her the most challenging roleof her career. In 2 Seconds, Briand's feature debut, she plays Laurie,a professional mountain-bike racer who gets fired from her team and becomesa bike courier in downtown Montreal. The actress, who had not ridden abicycle since her teens, underwent 10 weeks of intensive training for theshoot. 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 traffic­andjust the speed, and the strength that you didn't know you had."

Briand, 34 and an avid cyclist herself, says she wanted Laurier "tofeel the freedom you get on a bicycle, that feeling of being stoned onadrenaline." Laurier wore no makeup and submitted to the unflattering gazeof 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 abee." But Laurier says her greatest challenge was getting inside the headof 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'sLe Party (1989), found it easier to play a stripper than a circumspectcyclist. "The stripper was passionate and dramatic," she says, "and soam I."

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

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