Mystery thriller ‘The Reunion,’ starring Ioan Gruffudd, was presented at Monte-Carlo Television Festival Sunday.
The action in upcoming mystery thriller “The Reunion,” starring “Harrow’s” Ioan Gruffudd, centers on three characters in two time-zones, 25 years apart, but the emotions and personalities of the characters are consistent, the show’s British director Bill Eagles explained at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival Sunday. The English-language show, produced by Sydney Gallonde at Make It Happen Studio and co-produced by MGM Intl. TV Productions and broadcaster France Televisions, is based on Guillaume Musso’s bestselling novel “La Jeune fille et la nuit.”
The story opens in the present day, at a reunion at an international school in the south of France where three former friends reconnect. They grew apart and lost touch, but they are still bound by a tragic secret tied to the disappearance of a fellow student 25 years ago. Although Eagles acknowledged that having the same characters in two time-zones presented challenges, the key to overcoming them lay in the novel. “Guillaume Musso set out his characters so well at age 18, and understood their evolution over a period of 25 years, that the lines the characters were delivering in our present totally chimed in with the evolution of the characters from where we had seen them as young characters.”
He added: “Essentially, if we believe in the young cast, we believe in the consequences of their actions, murderous actions, actions of betrayal, of obsessive love, of denial, and then we inform these older characters with the same principles, and look at how those feelings and those emotions have festered over 25 years. Then when we bring these characters together, we find a total belief in and synthesis between the young and the old.”
In a video presentation shown at the festival, Musso explained that his time working as a teacher at an international school in the South of France was “the trigger” for writing the novel.
