Charles Berling as you’ve never seen him before. This Wednesday, March 15, the TV movie The Whistlers is broadcast on France 2. A detective fiction in which the actor plays a police instructor and gives the answer to actress Nadia Farès, heroine of the thriller investigating the disappearance of a young feminist blogger .
In the skin of Commander Maulin, the famous actor plays a tough character shaped by the patriarchy. “Maulin had never questioned himself. He did not take the measure of the suffering and the trauma that can be inflicted on a woman”, he explains in the pages of Télé 7 Jours. “Fate will put Captain Marianne Kacem (Nadia Farès) on her way, and this will force her to make a moral journey and to reconsider her behavior towards the fairer sex”.
Unlike his character in The Whistlers, Charles Berling claims to have a feminist conscience. A notion that he considered very early in his youth. “I was raised by my mother and my grandmother, who were very feminist. They fought for their freedom, and made me understand quite early that being a boy did not exempt me from certain tasks. Mentalities can only evolve through education”, says the sexagenarian to our colleagues.
Driven by his convictions, Charles Berling is never stingy with secrets about his private life in the media. Recently, the actor returned to his sentimental past. The opportunity for him to discuss his relationships with women and men.
In an interview granted on Canal in En Aparté, this March 14, Charles Berling spoke about his love life. For the famous actor, “sexuality is not on the one hand the feminine identity, and on the other the masculine identity”. Before returning in detail to his own experience on the air. “In social debates, young people talk a lot about gender, I have experienced that a lot. I practiced it in a concrete way, that is to say, to be both feminine and masculine. A sex moves in life. Me, I had a homosexual period, now I’m not anymore…”.
On the private side, Charles Berling has shared the life of several celebrities. In the 2000s, he was the lover of Carla Bruni with whom he shared a discreet idyll. “I have a lot of affection for Carla. We loved each other passionately and we remained very good friends. Now she has her love life, but she is someone who will always be dear to me, as d ‘other women in my life’, told the star of the film Le Prénom in 2008 for Gala.
Since their separation, the actor has rebuilt his life with Virginie Coupérie-Eiffel, the granddaughter of Gustave Eiffel and former companion of Julien Clerc. A story that is now combined with the past: in 2017, Charles Berling formalized his relationship with the young actress Pauline Chevalier (seen in Balthazar on TF1). Happy couple, did the actor have children?
Among the women who mattered to Charles Berling, the photographer Sophie Hatier has an important place in his life. Indeed, the couple welcomed their child, a boy named Émile, in 1990. Despite his separation from the son’s mother, the actor was more or less present with his offspring in his education.
“I was there, I’ve always been there, I’ve always cared about him, but I would say that time makes our relationship better. When you’re in acting, it’s hard, you leave a lot. . I loved Émile at all ages, but I was not there enough, that’s for sure”, he confided the one who would have more than 200 conquests to his credit, in the pages of Gala. If Émile does not seem to be a heartthrob, like his father, he nevertheless followed in his footsteps in the cinema where he leads his career brilliantly.
However, Émile Berling was not destined to become an actor like his illustrious father. “When I was little, I did not imagine myself as an actor. I wanted to become a dog handler. I had even taken a course in third grade with this in mind”, he admitted to our colleagues. Since his first major role in Les Hauts Murs by Christian Faure in 2008, the 32-year-old actor has starred in cult films such as Le Refuge by François Ozon (in 2010), A bag of marbles by Christian Duguay (in 2017) and According to the police of Frédéric Videau (in 2022). On the television side, the son of Charles Berling also made an appearance in Captain Marleau on France 3.
