Thomas Jolly, actor, theater director, and showman extraordinaire, is worried about fish. For the past 18 months, he has been the man in charge of delivering the opening and closing ceremonies for this summer’s Olympics and Paralympics—extravaganzas that will take the city of Paris as their stage. They will be witnessed, along just under four miles of river, by 300,000 spectators, not to mention the billions who’ll see them on TV.
It’s the most ambitious Olympic opening ceremony in history, and perhaps also the one with the greatest constraints. Jolly can’t rehearse in situ, or the closely guarded secrecy around the ceremonies would be blown. We know his plans include around 200 boats, some of which will transport a heroic procession of athletes, and that his route along the Seine, from the National History Museum to the Eiffel Tower, will recount scenes from French history. But Jolly is not making it easy for himself: Aside from the security challenge, and the uncontrollable weather, he’s committed to preserving the environment (he has decided that two thirds of what he’s planning will take place under natural light). Most of all, he’s determined not to disturb the natural habitats of the Seine’s aquatic life. So “there will be very little construction,” he says. “We’ll use what’s already built. And it’s not bad: It’s called the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais….”
Jolly, 42, speaks like an orator, in articulate paragraphs full of rallying sentiments and emotional wisdom. Only occasionally does he pause to own up to the everyday. “To be completely honest with you, I’m worried about 10,000 things,” he says eventually. “In fact, this project is so gigantic that I can either panic straight away and collapse right here in front of you, or I can learn to preserve a kind of distance and do things steadily.” Luckily, as he puts it, risk is his best friend. For years, Jolly has been fond of a phrase by the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca, and it’s coming in handy now: “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.”
We have met in the auditorium of the Opéra-Comique in Paris, a Rococo 18th-century theater inaugurated by Marie Antoinette 10 years before her head fell from the guillotine. The place means a lot to Jolly: He staged Offenbach’s Fantasio here in 2017, and later Macbeth Underworld. The opéra comique genre—not comedy but theater with music—is close to his heart. It’s early in the morning, and Jolly is dressed for a day of dashing around: black cords, sneakers, and a bright yellow zip-up jacket designed by the choreographer Léo Walk—a Christmas present from his partner. Above us, a school outing has assembled on the balcony. Jolly waves to the children before setting up a couple of velvet-backed chairs for us in a loggia, taking care to give me a view both of him and of the stage.
Jolly has the enduring air of a boy wonder: expressive, agile, restlessly imaginative. Ever since his early childhood, he has been a walking advertisement for thinking big. Growing up in a tiny village in northern France, he staged imaginary dramas in which he played Cleopatra and imaginary operas in which he directed dancers while listening to Verdi’s The Force of Destiny. As an actor, he has described himself as “liquid.” He weeps, he sweats, he emotes through his pores. But more significant than any of the things he has done on his own are the ways in which he has brought people together.
“He has a kind of aura,” his longtime costume designer, Sylvette Desquest, says. “He gets everyone involved.” His stock-in-trade, she adds, is theater that is both “demanding and popular.” In 2014 he staged all three of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays in the 15th-century Popes’ Palace in Avignon. The production included 150 characters and lasted 18 hours—from 10 a.m. to 4 a.m. the next day. It was a hit: Jolly’s Shakespeare earned comparisons to Game of Thrones. Four years later he returned to Avignon with Seneca’s Thyestes—not an obvious crowd-pleaser—to packed houses yet again. In 2022 he took on Starmania, a much-loved French and Canadian rock opera written in 1976 and not performed since the mid ’90s. “Everyone looked at me skeptically,” he recalls. “ ‘It’s Starmania, he’ll never manage it, blah, blah….’ ” Jolly claps his hands with relish at the memory of the challenge, and his response: “Okay. I’m interested.” The show cemented his reputation with the mainstream (the costumes were designed by Nicolas Ghesquière). That same year Jolly added Richard III to the Henry VI plays, creating a 24-hour Shakespearean tetralogy, from the reign of “an ultrapowerful, respected, conquering king to the worst—a monster.” (He played Richard III himself.) “And that’s interesting to share,” Jolly adds, “because it’s also, potentially, what could happen to us.”
H6R3, as he called this monumental production, became the subject of a documentary series on French TV. The public was gripped, not only by Jolly’s extreme venture but by what would happen to those who lived through it. That’s Jolly’s interest too. “You can put life on hold for two hours while you go and see a show. You can be hungry and hold on, you can need the bathroom and wait, you can be sleepy and stay awake, or fall asleep in your seat. Life can be put in parentheses. But over 24 hours, it can’t. You’re hungry, you’re thirsty, you need to sleep or pee, and suddenly you’re sharing your life with others.” There were intermissions—for meals, stretching, naps in the corridors. “In 24 hours, people start to speak to each other, to offer each other food or cushions, to tell each other stories. You get to know your neighbor because you’re sharing an adventure,” Jolly says.
When the 24 hours were over, the deafening, exalted applause in Jolly’s theater in Angers was a measure of what over a thousand people had experienced together—not simply a performance but an act of unity.
For Jolly, the Olympic ceremonies will be something like that. “It’s a celebration of being alive,” he explains, “and of living together.”
Jolly is keen on the Greeks—their amphitheaters and their myths—and has a soft spot for the era of Edgar Allan Poe. “Wherever there are strange children, strange houses, ghosts, murders, fog, spinning tables, moving walls—I’m in,” he says. The combination informs his lush, phantasmagoric productions: They are dramatically lit, dark in undertone, mythic in flavor, and always accompanied by music—a world that is part Julius Caesar, part Rocky Horror. The 300 or so costumes Desquest designed for his production of Gounod’s opera Roméo et Juliette last year included jewel-encrusted skeletons, blood-red Pierrots, death-mask rabbits, and tutus made of giant Elizabethan ruffs—clothes for a ball held at the end of the world.
Desquest, a seasoned costumière who wrote and asked to work with Jolly when he was just 26, tells me that they never make period costumes. She and Jolly look to history in order to build their own staged universes. (It’s no surprise that Jolly admires fashion designers who are theatrical. He has collaborated with Gareth Pugh and loves John Galliano, Rick Owens, McQueen—as well as the younger designers Charles de Vilmorin and Kevin Germanier.)
It’s a safe bet that the Olympic ceremonies will follow this tradition. “The Olympics, in their founding legend, are curative,” Jolly says, alluding to our political moment. “They heal the plague and they bring peace.” And the significance of the Seine? “To begin with, the Seine was a goddess,” Jolly says, “a nymph called Sequana, who turned herself into a river so she could escape from Neptune. So the Seine is a woman who resists a violent man. That’s a very big symbol, and one I’m going to use because it makes the river a female force of resistance.”
The morning Jolly and I met, the Seine was full of roiling brown whorls, as if thousands of underwater creatures were stirring it with their hair. This is where the Olympic swimmers will—supposedly—compete, a plan based on a drastic promise made in 1990 by then mayor Jacques Chirac. Scientists are now frantically attempting to depollute the 483-mile river in the run-up to the Games. After a few days of rain, the levels of E. coli are dangerously high; much of the city’s plumbing system dates to the 19th century. This grand plan means that France’s most significant contribution to the Olympics may be exposing the world’s athletes to Parisian sewage. But the French are nothing if not ambitious: Those in charge of sanitation have compared the construction of their new wastewater tank to the building of Notre-Dame.
The president of the 2024 Paris Olympics, Tony Estanguet, is a former Olympic canoeist, for whom the water holds special meaning. “Linking sport, emotion, spectacle, water, and ecology really speaks to me,” Estanguet says. “And I’m extremely proud that Thomas Jolly has agreed to direct this ceremony. Everything is in place for the Seine to be unpolluted,” he adds confidently. “Thanks to the Games, people will be able to swim in it.”
“I’m not in charge of that,” Jolly says with a smile of relief. He was chosen by a specially appointed committee after he gave a double-page interview to the French newspaper L’Équipe, riffing on how he might direct a ceremony on the Seine. This led to a call from Thierry Reboul, an executive director of the 2024 Olympics, followed by one from the mayor of Paris. When they finally told him, at the end of August 2022, that he had the job, he was so bowled over he rang his mother in tears.
Now, what Jolly really seeks to demonstrate is that there is “room for everyone in Paris. Maybe it’s a little chaotic, it’s true, but that allows everyone to find a place for themselves.” The opening ceremony will be a success, Jolly says, “if everyone feels represented in it.”
Jolly’s childhood was spent in a village in Normandy so small it is named after its only street: La Rue-Saint-Pierre. Some might have found a place with only a few hundred inhabitants limiting, but Jolly remembers an endless horizon—green fields, cows, sheep, “and above all the possibility of exploration.”
His parents, a nurse and a printer, allowed him to think anything was possible. His grandmother made him costumes fit for a sultan’s disco. And when he watched a TV show about teenagers hosting a radio program, he made a cassette tape of his own and sent it to the local radio station in Rouen. He was given a weekly radio show for kids, which he continued to host every Wednesday for five years.
Then he was bullied at secondary school. “I had yellow Doc Martens. All day I was jeered at because of my yellow shoes. I thought, Do you realize how absurd this is?” In the world of theater, he rediscovered the “anything is possible” freedom he’d had in childhood. “The first time I set foot on a stage,” Jolly recalls, “I thought, I can be more at ease with myself here. I felt closer to myself than I did in life.”
Jolly became the beneficiary of a democratic initiative begun in postwar France to decentralize theaters. No longer would Paris be a high-art hub for the elite; theater would exist for the people, everywhere. And so it was in Brittany that Jolly studied theater before setting up his own troupe, La Piccola Familia, in Normandy. He became the artistic director of a theater in the West and took productions to the South. His job with the Olympics is the first time he has spent an extended period in Paris.
Perhaps because of this—or perhaps, he thinks, because of the internet—his interests have no hierarchy. He can read an article about Plato while listening to Beyoncé. He loves it when he finds, buried in a Baroque opera, musical phrases he recognizes from Madonna.
Ordinarily, Jolly would be out at night much more often. Given the chance of a chic occasion, he likes to wear tightly tailored suits and smart shoes. For now, though, his life is “quite austere.” “I don’t go to bed too late, I don’t go out much, I’m very focused,” he tells me. To unwind, he plays video games: Assassin’s Creed, The Legend of Zelda, or—a childhood favorite—Prince of Persia. “If I want someone to fly or burst into flames, I can do that straight away,” he says. “It allows me to be in a world apart.” He shares this passion with his partner, also called Thomas (“We’re Thomas squared,” he jokes), whom he met during an interval at the theater. The other Thomas offers some respite to the austerity, though Jolly admits that he’s pretty annoying to live with at the moment.
As he describes this, Jolly’s voice catches in his throat and his eyes fill with tears. “It’s isolating,” he says. “I know I’m cutting myself off from my family and my friends…. But I’ll catch up. It’ll be okay. I’ll catch up.”
There’s one thing about Paris, Jolly reflects: “It’s pretty cramped.” Wherever he goes next, he’d like it to be somewhere with a view. “I’d like to see the sky,” he says, giving the impression that even this wouldn’t be his limit. “I need the sky.”
Produced by AL Studio; Set Design: Mary Howard; © Julien Condemine and Anouk Bonaldi.