Valerie Lemercier with Laurent Delahousse: The extended interview is available

Paris – 22 July 2026: The conversation between Laurent Delahousse and Valerie Lemercier on “20h30 le dimanche” is now available on France 2’s replay service. The program follows directly after the evening news and gives its guest that increasingly rare television space in which a career is not merely promoted, but allowed to be considered at leisure.

For decades, Valerie Lemercier has been one of the most distinctive figures in French entertainment cinema. As an actress, writer, director and comedian, she has never allowed herself to be confined to a single role. Her art thrives on closely observed voices, small social cruelties and that controlled exaggeration which makes audiences laugh without treating them as fools.

Laurent Delahousse’s interview format favors the encounter over rapid-fire exchanges. The editorial team describes the series as a sequence of personal interviews and encounters following France 2’s 8 p.m. broadcast. It focuses on biographies, artistic paths and a look at contemporary France, occasionally ending on a light, humorous note.

For Lemercier, this is a fitting stage. Her work has always moved between stage persona and film role, between grand gestures and the precise observation of a sentence that reveals an entire milieu. Her comic characters in particular have often unsettled French certainties more elegantly than many a cultural-policy debate. They initially seem eccentric and then, almost imperceptibly, become deeply human.

The current program announcement names Valerie Lemercier as the interview guest, but does not publish a detailed list of topics. In this case, that is almost a small virtue: audiences can expect an interview whose appeal lies not solely in a piece of news, but in the encounter with an artist who has always helped shape her own public image – sometimes sharply drawn, sometimes affectionately shifted.

Even on French television, this kind of portrait format cannot be taken for granted. Between the rhythm of news, the logic of series and promotional appointments, little time remains for detours, memories and contradictions. “20h30 le dimanche” seeks to begin precisely there. The program treats prominent guests not as mere suppliers of a headline, but as bearers of a story that cannot be exhausted in three sentences.

The recording now made available therefore offers less a current scandal than a cultural afterglow for the start of the week: Valerie Lemercier in conversation with Laurent Delahousse, after the news bulletin and before the next media noise. One might say: an appointment for anyone who would still occasionally like to hear a voice on television before it becomes a punchline.