Sparkling in the face of rejection in Ten Percent

The British version of French comedy Call My Agent offers a candid insight into the rollercoaster world of actors and those who advocate for them

The cast of Ten Percent.

There’s an old Hollywood joke. A mild-mannered, rather ordinary-looking gent, an actor’s agent in fact, is driving along North Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood when he sees a famous actor walking into Canters, the deli restaurant that has fed the appetites of stars like Ryan Gosling, Jim Carrey and James Corden across the decades. “There goes a guy who takes 90 per cent of what I earn,” he says sourly.

I was reminded of the old gag when I caught up with the British remake of the somewhat surprisingly successful Netflix French comedy Call My Agent - Dix Pour Cent, as it’s known at home, which was such a hit during Covid lockdowns. And what good company it provided. (The title refers to the 10 per cent cut that agents take from the clients they represent.)

The word-of-mouth hit show, which began as an idea by former agent Dominique Besnehard, and was created by writer Fanny Herrero, takes place at a Parisian talent agency where agents scramble, in an often unseemly or frantic fashion, to keep their star clients contented, and their business financially on track after the sudden death of their founder.

Apart from the British version there are around 20 other remakes either signed or in production around the globe, with rumours of auditions taking place in Australia. The idea, it seems, took eight years to develop before Herrero, also the showrunner, found the right glittery comic tone, the pacy witty dialogue, a fast moving twisty plot, and a clever balance between lovely melodrama francaise, an open heart and knowing references for those devoted to their love of cinema.

As the New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz suggested recently while writing about the show, the very idea of it is a bit of a droll joke, as she detailed the way agents are hardly a beloved caste when it comes to their representation in popular culture. And the way writers in particular “have sought revenge by portraying agents as money-grubbing morons, sleazebags, and pitiful incompetents”. But Call My Agent is about the love of cinema possessed by acolytes whose lives are lived in a kind of cinephilic haze, deeply in love with movies and for whom their work is a vocation.

The British eight-episode version sees John Morton writing, directing the initial episodes and executive producing. A few years ago Morton gave us the wonderful W1A, a fictional satirical behind-the-scenes series based at the BBC’s London headquarters. It follows Hugh Bonneville’s Ian Fletcher as he begins his new job as the BBC’s Head of Values, and the daft problems he encounters daily.

He quickly finds Broadcasting House a “highly secretive, some might say frankly incomprehensible building”. And that massaging presenters’ egos, deftly handling scandals and breaking through mindless creative meetings is all in a day’s work.

Much as it is for the agents who feature in Ten Percent. This is the daunting, emotionally draining part of the job. As one of the tough female agents says at one point to a colleague having problems with a client, “If you want to be romantic, you’re in the wrong job.” The first rule – keep the stars happy whatever they demand.

In press interviews as the show went to air in the UK, Morton expressed his hope that the remake will “reassure” viewers that the creators haven’t “done something completely different” to the original French version. “I just think it was a beautiful and truthful and totally believable story at the heart of it and threw up lots of interesting issues and they handled it very well. So with the first one, we stayed pretty close with the guest star story to the French show,” he said. (Celebrity cameos provide much of the humour in the original version – stars like Juliette Binoche, Monica Bellucci and Isabelle Huppert – and the English version features major figures like Emma Corrin, Helena Bonham Carter, Olivia Williams, Clemence Poesy and Dominic West in a range of amusing, self-deprecating cameos.)

In fact it’s very similar, with the founder of agency Nightingale Hart, played suavely by Jim Broadbent, having a heart attack on the way to collect a Lifetime Achievement Award for his services to show business; “that rehearsal for your own funeral”, as one of the agents mutters. And like the demise of the founder of the French business, his death creates chaos and confusion at the agency.

Jim Broadbent in Ten Percent.

The characters are little different either. Jack Davenport is Jonathan Hart, the patriarch’s son, a conniving operator with a few secrets from his past and a beautiful wife he appears to have persuaded to have some little facial touch-ups. Lydia Leonard is the no bullshit lesbian maven who terrifies her assistants and has an eye for any pretty barmaid who looks back, known for her one-night stands with girls she’s never going to see again. (The role has made Camille Cottin from the French original an international star.)

Prasanna Puwanarajah is Daniel Barlow, the nice, rather hopeless Gabriel from the original, where he was played by the charmingly scruffy Gregory Montel. And the inimitable Maggie Steed is the matriarchal, blunt Stella, her clients all knights and dames, known in the agency as the National Treasury. And the lovely young actress Hiftu Quasem plays Misha, the new assistant who manages to find her way into the agency after being told, “We don’t do walk-ins; it’s not a hairdressers”. Like Fanny Sidney’s Camille in the original, she’s charmingly relatable and it so happens that the son of the patriarch is her birth father, a nice plot twist as it is in the French show.

I love the way this drama gets the realities of the agents’ lives so drolly, but also the actors’, the way that in every one of them, no matter how famous, there is what the performer Simon Callow called “an irreducible minimum of insecurity”. Every performance is a voyage into the unknown of their own ability.

And how so much of the actor’s life, is too frequently a narrow world of grievance, rumour and easeful denigration. The way that before directors they are so often forced into a kind of feeble humbleness and gratitude, even abasement. Again, no matter how famous and celebrated.

The fact is, as the lives of the agency’s clients reveal, if you can’t cope with an actor’s lifetime of rejection, don’t be one – there are months of boredom, knock-backs and self-loathing interrupted by moments of savage indignity.

The main plotline concerns guest star Kelly Macdonald dryly satirising her celebrity as a feminist client in her forties who is line for the coveted role of Birdwoman in a big budget franchise movie but the producers now say she’s too old for the role. Jonathan attempts to steer her to a famous plastic surgeon known for the secret power that flows from him. “You’ll come back looking like you,” he promises. “You won’t look like Melanie Griffith – those days are gone.”

And then there’s the delightful old actor Simon Gould, played wonderfully by Tim McInnerny, a tweedy former alcoholic given a new lease on life by auditioning for a show called Greenfield Road. And the sequence is excruciating, the screen test the purest form of the performing artist’s workaday confrontation with death, a process where people gather together to inflict humiliation on an actor.

Being reduced to the quarry is a necessity, part of the business of adjusting to the entertainment industry’s demands for insensitivity.

And as the show celebrates so entertainingly that’s why actors need an agent. Not only do they help disguise your constant depression – something the French version dramatised so acutely and sometimes emotionally – they provide a kind of inside conduit into the workings of an often merciless industry.

So as in Ten Percent the agents serve as security guards fending off creepy studio predators, babysitters and psychological motivators, putting their lives on the line for the self-centred narcissistic luvvies and equally egoistic auteur directors and self-infatuated producers.

As an old actor I loved this show, as much as the original provided such pleasure. It’s not as glib or chic but its actors are equally authentic, Morton’s writing effectively taut and his direction effortless, with short scenes strung together often with a witty musical complement from Rael Jones’s soundtrack.

As Lydia Leonard, who is terrific as the svelte Rebecca Fox says, “We’re not as cool as the French, so it’s a bit more bumbling.”

Ten Percent, streaming on Amazon Prime Video.