Sylvie Meis lies on the beach of Saint-Tropez with a different guy every year and that always produces very sunny pictures, but what does that really look like? “A very sour face.”
You may wonder whether Sylvie Meis still knows who she actually is. Her whole life seems to be one big act, purely to keep her PR value high, and that is why she is quite unpopular in her own country. In particular, that annual play in Saint-Tropez where she presents her new lover of that year causes annoyance.
Relaxed
That woman is really very agile in terms of PR, says Story boss Guido den Aantrekker in the AD program Famous or Infamous. “I think she’s very exhausted, if you can say so. Yet you always manage to achieve your goal in a very smart, sometimes cunning way. And the goal for Sylvie Meis is of course only one goal: Sylvie Meis.”
“I met Sylvie once, when she had just finished the film Costa! had turned. It was at a society lunch where I met her and she accosted me because she understood that I was a reporter for the weekly magazine Story. And she actually literally asked me: ‘Guido, tell me: how do I become famous in this profession?’”
Saint Tropez
What was Sylvie like at that time? “She was like that then eager and ambitious to make it, but more as a celebrity than as an actress, because she didn’t have to be with me for that. Her goal was really: how do I get into the magazines, how do people talk about me? That has actually always been Sylvie’s ambition.”
The Story boss continues: “I regularly visit Saint-Tropez on the Cote d’Azur in the South of France and Sylvie always comes there at the end of June and there is always a row of paparazzi and they really photograph everything that even remotely smells of fame and Sylvie knows that.”
Sour face
Sylvie makes grateful use of this, Guido explains. “So every time she has a new love, you can set the clock for her to go into the sea with her new love at the end of June. There is hugging, cuddling, cooing, kissing. All those photographers are taking pictures and she just knows that she will be in every magazine the following week.”
How does Sylvie behave right after her paparazzi pose? When she thinks no one is watching anymore? “Then she walks out of the beach with a very sour face and lies back under the roof to read a magazine and that is Sylvie Meis. People just don’t see that part.”
Everything is fake
According to Guido, that woman is quite fake. “Her life is fake in the sense that everything is really happening, but it’s not real life. People who live such a jet-set life and are focused on appearance and eat in the right restaurants and spend hours on an Instagram photo to look as perfect as possible… That is not real life.”
“Sylvie’s image in the Netherlands is such that no one actually takes her seriously and she is seen as a source of entertainment. I think she played the role of Sylvie Meis very well, but I think she started to believe a little too much in the world she wanted to end up in and pushed it a little too far.”