Sigourney Weaver plays the diva in hilarious comedy Call My Agent!

The Hollywood star is the first English-speaking actress in the hit French series.

Sigourney Weaver as herself and Fanny Sidney, who has played ASK staffer Camille Valentini since Season 1.

Sigourney Weaver dancing wildly, Charlotte Gainsbourg slipping on a banana peel — the fourth and final season of the French comedy series Call My Agent! has a lot to make audiences laugh, just at the time when we need it. If you haven’t seen the first three seasons in this continuing story it’s best to start at the beginning.

When the series first premiered on French national television in 2015 Call My Agent! was a water-cooler moment for office workers. It was all anyone could talk about. Everyone waited eagerly for a new instalment to watch yet another famous French actor sending up their public image. The series went on to become an international hit with remakes now going ahead in Britain, Canada, India and Turkey. It’s a rare case of French humour working well abroad with series creator Fanny Herrero’s writing on the first three seasons widely cited as the reason.

“I’m more influenced by American comedy than French comedy,” Herrero admits. “It’s not a French tradition for actors to critique themselves.”

Set in a Parisian talent agency called ASK (Agence Samuel Kerr) we follow a group of agents and how they cajole and manipulate their famous clients to get their way. Then a funny thing happened. Audiences fell in love with the agents and now the actors playing them have become stars in their own right.

The lead in the series is Andrea, a tough, ruthless gay agent and the queen of cajolers, who looks after some of France’s major stars. She is played by Camille Cottin, a former English teacher who now is enjoying a leap into English-language movies (first up Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater with Matt Damon). At the 2019 Zurich Film Festival I had been on the Series jury with Herrero, a lively woman with traces of Andrea and although she is based on a real agent, there is some of Herrero in the character.

Series creator and writer of the first three seasons, Fanny Herrero.

“Yes, there is some of me in Andrea,” Herrero confirms over the phone in Paris last week. “I’m heterosexual but this is like a version of me that is wilder and with no filter. We can say it’s the fantasy of what it is to be a strong woman and sometimes not to care about what people will say.”

While she also concedes that she brought her own lively sense of humour to the show — “the way people walk and talk fast, there’s a lot of walk and talk and sense of the absurd” — she also made it personal. When Herrero had a baby after season one, she had Andrea do the same in season three.

“It was a kind of a hard moment for me, because I was so into the series and also my baby,” Herrero recalls. “It was this schizophrenia that mothers can sometimes experience and I really wanted to put that into Andrea’s arc, how you can be a woman having a baby and also not want to stay home with the baby all the time.”

The series (French title Dix Pour Cent or Ten Per Cent, the agency’s fee) is based on the experiences of Dominique Besnehard who had worked in a talent agency. The agents initially were based on actual people and he knows celebrities too. “He knows everyone in the business,” Herrero says.

She recalls how initially getting stars to make fools of themselves was not easy. Sophie Marceau was meant to star in the pilot.

“She said yes at the beginning, but when she read the first script, she began to hesitate and then said no,” Herrero recalls. “It was like a tragedy because we were so happy to have her as she is so popular, but she needs a part that is perfect for her. The whole first season was really tricky. So many people said no. It was really a sad moment where we lost some of our confidence.”

Ultimately Cecile de France took the role in the pilot. “She was so great and funny, and she was perfect,” Herrero says. As the series developed traction, major stars including Fabrice Luchini and Christopher Lambert, Isabelle Adjani and Juliette Binoche signed on for the second season, with Jean Dujardin, Isabelle Huppert, Monica Bellucci and Beatrice Dalle appearing in the third.

Isabelle Adjani is among the big stars to have a role in Call My Agent! Picture: Julien M. Hekimian/Getty Images

Herrero left after the third season, having worked on the series for seven years. “It was a lot of time, a lot of energy,” she says. “I was almost into burnout. It’s a very intense life when you are working on that kind of show. It never ends, from the writing and then the making it and when the season is over you have to start a new one.

“You can’t really go on holiday and my family life was suffering. Also, I was getting a little empty because everything in my life was my work and I think to write well you have to live stuff. You have to breathe a little. And at the moment I was not breathing any more.”

After a break she is developing a new Netflix series about young French stand-up comedians. Whether Herrero’s pizzazz is missing from the new season you can be the judge. Still the series remains highly addictive, starting with Gainsbourg and most notably featuring Weaver, the first English-language actor to feature. The Aliens star, currently in theatres in My Salinger Year, showcases her comedic talents and lets rip.

“Everyone gave me a warm welcome and they were very gracious about my French,” Weaver says. “You have to learn to trust each other and by the end we were improvising and it was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. I had watched the previous three seasons drooling.

“It’s wonderful to show the secret side of these people you see on screen and to make fun of them. I’m always ready to make fun of my image. It’s a good thing for an actor. Of course actors are human beings and lot of people don’t realise we have flaws.

“I enjoyed having flaws as this character called Sigourney Weaver and it was fun to watch them come up with the difficult movie star I could become. I’ve always loved comedy more than anything and Margaret in My Salinger Year has a very dry and cutting wit too.”

During the 11-day shoot Weaver spent a few hours each day learning her upbeat dance to a jazz version of the French national anthem The Marseillaise. “I felt hopeless but they were patient and I got better every day,” she says.

Marc Fitoussi directed the episode as well as those with Gainsbourg and Sandrine Kiberlain in the new series.

“Sigourney was a dancer before and she did a lot of modern jazz and she worked hard for this,” Fitoussi says. “Incredibly, there is only one frame that is not her, the most spectacular turning and doing something enormous. Also, she was the only actor who we didn’t need to come back and post-synch their dialogue because her French was perfect. She was so prepared.”

Laure Calamy and Nicolas Maury play employees of the ASK talent agency.

Fitoussi has made two films with Huppert and was integral in bringing the exacting French star to Call My Agent! Her episode that he directed in season three is one of the best.

“We had contacted Isabelle for season two and she wasn’t available,” Herrero recalls. “She’s always busy, which became the hilarious story of her character who manages to go back and forth between different sets. Isabelle’s 75-minute episode is one of the longest as she was always adding stuff. She was really funny and I was surprised by her capacity to mock herself.”

Huppert loves the series even if she disagrees that she is as big a workaholic as her character.

“It’s exaggerated,” she says. “I’m not disagreeable or mean like she is, but in the life of an actress there’s a hyperactivity, an energy to do many things at the same time.” She notes proudly how her daughter, Lolita Chammah, appears in season four. “She plays Mother Christmas in the Jean Reno episode and is extremely droll.”

As for the actors playing the agents, besides Cottin, Laure Calamy, who portrays the dizzy Noemie, has received a massive career boost. While she can be seen in Dominik Moll’s Only The Animals, releasing this week in Australia, she stars in Antoinette in the Cevennes, playing a similar comedic role to Call My Agent!.

Nicolas Maury, who plays the effusive gay agent Herve, is red hot too, and has just directed his first film, My Best Part, where Huppert even has a cameo. In the film Maury co-stars with Nathalie Baye (Catch Me If You Can) who appeared in the first season of Call My Agent! and she now plays his mother.

Ultimately the cast became a kind of family who went on to work together on other projects.

From the beginning Herrero says the fact that Andrea and Herve are gay was never going to be emphasised.

“It was just the characters,” she says. “It wasn’t like it was this political thing. There is no single episode where someone says something critical about their sexuality. It was absolutely normal.”

Herrero also ensured the characters had a universal appeal. They are neither glamorous nor sexy, she says, and there’s also an older woman agent, Arlette, played by Liliane Rovere, who is fabulous — and she now appears in Huppert’s latest movie, Mama Weed.

“It was really important for me not to have models, especially for the women characters,” Herrero notes. “I wanted different kinds of bodies, physical appearance and ages. The psychological characterisations are also very different from the norm. These women are not moved by men; they are not moved only by love. They exist for themselves. They exist for their careers, they exist for their friendships and that was a conscious decision.”

Call My Agent! is now showing on Netflix.