Fantine

course.

Yeah, fun fact, I played Fantine in high school, and I won the National Coca-Cola Scholarship, and I got some money toward my college for playing her in high school, which was pretty special.

But I love that show.

That...

So you can always tell it's Anne Hathaway acting as her character.

But she had to lose so much weight and go through so much on her body for Les Miserables that I feel like she had no choice but to become Fantine.

Yeah.

And because it was such a like physical transformation.

So when Tom Hooper, fresh off his Best Picture win for The King's Speech, announced he was bringing it to the big screen with a cast this stacked, expectations were enormous.

Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean, Russell Crowe as Jabba, Anne Hathaway as Fantine, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Samantha Barks and Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen as the Thénardier.

That is a serious line-up for a musical.

And musicals on film are notoriously difficult to get right.

If you've somehow never crossed paths with it, Valjean is released on parole in 1815, and after a bishop shows him a tremendous, undeserved act of mercy, he breaks that parole, changes his name, and builds a new life as a factory owner and mayor.

But Javert, the policeman who oversaw his release, spends the next two decades hunting him with a single-minded devotion to the letter of the law.

Along the way, Bojan crosses paths with Fantine, a worker from his own factory whose life collapses into poverty and prostitution, and he promises the dying woman he'll rescue her little daughter Cosette from the innkeepers who've been treating the child as a servant while bleeding her mother for money.

Years later, the story sweeps everyone into Paris and the doomed student uprising of 1832, the barricade, the young idealists, and a grown cosette falling in love with the revolutionary Marius.

Fameuil idolized Zéphine, an abridgment of Josephine.

Tholomyès had Fantine, called the Blonde, because of her beautiful sunny hair.

Favourite, Dahlia, Zéphine, and Fantine were four ravishing young women, perfumed and radiant, still a little like working women, and not yet entirely divorced from their needles, somewhat disturbed by intrigues, but still retaining on their faces something of the serenity of toil, and in their souls that flower of honesty which survives the first fall in woman.

One of the four was called the Young, because she was the youngest of them, and one was called the Old.

The Old one was twenty-three.

Not to conceal anything, the three first were more experienced, more heedless, and more emancipated into the tumult of life than Fantine the Blonde, who was still in her first illusions.

Dahlia, Zéphine, and especially Favourite could not have said as much.

There had already been more than one episode in their romance, though hardly begun, and the lover who had borne the name of Adolphe in the first chapter had turned out to be Alphonse in the second and Gustave in the third.

I'm going

to be like Fantine.

Mm-hmm.

You'll have your I dreamed a dream moment.

I mean, and the Les Mis film was a classic indication of that, because I think a lot of people that had done Les Mis back in the day were brought in to do the film, but not the roles that they would've done.

So she played Fantine, I think, and was incredible at it, and then she sort of head factory girl.

Yeah.

You know, because-

Well, Florence is immediately overwhelmed by the extra work of doing everyone's makeup.

Like, she spends so much time doing Jean Valjean's makeup that the actress who plays Cassette ends up having to do both Javert and Fantine's makeup.

And after rehearsals that day, the actress that plays Cassette tells Lucy that she will never be helping with makeup again because it had cut into her time for vocal warm-ups.

Important.