- "My salary is X. My expenses are Y. As long as my family is provided for, I do not care where the difference comes from. That is my entire involvement!"
- ―Jean-Claude to Bryan Mills
Jean-Claude Pitrel was a corrupt French police officer, bureaucrat, and former field agent, where he met Bryan Mills.
He was played by Oliver Rabourdin.
Character Biography
Bryan seeks help from an old friend, Jean-Claude, a bureaucrat and former field agent, now within French intelligence. Jean-Claude tells Bryan where to start looking, but warns him not to make trouble.
Some time later in the film, after Bryan destroys a construction site where a makeshift brothel has been set up, Jean-Claude attempts to persuade Bryan to return to the United States to avoid imprisonment in Europe but Bryan evades him. At one point, Jean-Claude also orders police to tell Bryan and they come close to arresting him, but Bryan eludes the trap.
Later, Bryan turns up unexpectedly to dinner with Jean-Claude and his wife, where he discovers that Jean-Claude knows things that he is not telling him. Jean-Claude attempts to shoot Bryan, but Bryan has unloaded Jean-Claude's pistol. Bryan then shoots Isabelle in the shoulder, and threatens to kill her and then him if he does not tell him where to find Saint-Clair. Jean-Claude complies and Bryan tells him that this could have been avoided had he only been less concerned about his desk job and more about what is right. Bryan tells him to apologize to Isabelle for him. When Jean-Claude tries to attack Bryan, he pistol-whips him across the skull with his Beretta 92FS pistol, knocking him out and ending their friendship.
Taken 2
Jean-Claude returns home one evening only to find something wrong. He goes for his pistol but Murad and his army of thugs stop him and tie him to a chair. They begin to torture Jean-Claude with scissors to coerce information about the current whereabouts of Bryan Mills. He explains that he knows nothing but his testicles are crushed and then reveal the teddy bear belonging to his children, symbolically confirming that Jean-Claude's children are dead. Jean-Claude is then most likely killed by the gang.
Trivia
- In the first movie he owned a SIG-Sauer P239 pistol as his personal sidearm, kept hidden in the bathroom apparently in case of a home invasion. In the second film, his duty sidearm is a SIG-Sauer SP2022, quite accurate for the French police.