Representing the other

The aim of this article is to show how a filmed fiction carries the vision of an exoticized Other and how racialized actors can slightly alter their characters. To do so, we carried out a seven-month ethnographic survey on an LGBT web series. Two of the protagonists in this fiction, the main character and his sister, are of North-African descent. This article focuses on the shooting period so as to analyse these racialised actors’ agency in a production intended for online broadcasting. They took advantage of grey areas in the screenplay to nuance the representation of a minority to which they belong, while remaining in a delicate relationship with the directors and the scriptwriter, who retained responsibility for directing the actors and for editing and writing the story.