Playing Hervé in Call My Agent brought Nicolas Maury international acclaim. Now, as the star turns to series directing, he tells Deadline about the lessons learned while working on that show, and how behind the camera he is channeling life’s bittersweet moments.
Seasons is Maury’s TV directorial debut. The miniseries weaves a love story spanning decades and it bowed on the highbrow Arte channel in France. HBO Max has snagged streaming rights for France and Belgium.
Seasons (Saisons, to give it its original Gallic title) traces a story that starts in 1991 at Les-Sables-d’Olonne, a French seaside resort on the Atlantic. Fifteen-year-old Camille (Stéphane Caillard) encounters best friends Martin (Abraham Wapler) and Alexandre (Lucas Bravo) on the beach, and it is the beginning of a love story that lasts more than thirty years.
Maury has directed for the big screen, making Garçon Chiffon, which played at Cannes in 2020. In Seasons, he appears on-screen as well as helming, and breaks down his style as a director. “It’s what I call the ‘melancomedy’ of life,” he says. “It is both disaster and happiness, sometimes at the same time, and a reminder of our mortality, being as close as possible to human beings and filming them like I would film an animal documentary.”
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Seasons producer Carole Lambert and creator Hélène Duchateau brought Maury on board. “It was fascinating to first inhabit the character of Camille,” he says about his female lead in the series. “To step into the skin of a woman, of this woman in particular, because I had to understand her in order to love her, or at least to look at her for a long time. And then to look at everyone else for a long time, at all the men and women in my series. I believe I am present in each of these magnificent characters, and that I understand them. It’s as if they were part of a slightly secret family, an ideal family.”
The story sees the characters move through the decades together, with episodes unfolding across specific seasons of the year. Maury says: “What I loved very much was the idea of growing old together. That is, allowing people, characters, to age, hand-in-hand with the actors.”
APC is selling the Windy Production series internationally and it is one of a handful of TV shows in the spotlight at Unifrance’s Paris Rendez-Vous event this week. It is set to be a busy 2026 for Maury, notably with the Call My Agent! movie dropping on Netflix this year, per our previous reporting.
Actor-director Maury talks about the lessons imparted from his time on the cult series and now movie. “Perhaps what it allowed me to see is how a series shooting day is not at all the same as a film shooting day, since there are far more minutes to shoot in a single day, and therefore many more pages of the script to film. Being physically accustomed, embodied, in my flesh, to that sustained rhythm of a series shoot helped me, as a director, to anticipate the staging and the speed required, while still trying not to impose the reduced timeframes and heavy days on the actors.”
That said, Maury adds that he always lives in the moment. “When I’m shooting, I am truly in the present and I don’t think about what I’ve done before.”