The Divorce

Synopsis. 

A broke, loudmouthed divorce lawyer, Thanasis Vakontios, thinks he’s just taking on another juicy case when Loula, the Prime Minister’s wife, comes to him convinced her husband is cheating with his secretary Jenny. The proof? Disgustingly sweet Facebook messages between “Jennaki-lagoudaki” and someone called “Proedros” whose profile photo is the actual PM. While Loula and her friend Fani plan blood-soaked legal revenge, the government is collapsing under rumors, a looming vote of confidence, and this supposed sex scandal around the “horny Prime Minister.”

The twist: “Proedros” isn’t the PM at all, it’s his driver Orestis, who uses the PM’s photo and nickname online. Their private kink-chat accidentally leaked, everyone assumed the worst, and a whole political crisis was born from a Facebook misunderstanding. After literally crashing his junk car into the PM’s Mercedes, Thanasis pieces it together and drags Orestis to a late-night meeting at restaurant Frontier, where everyone converges: the PM and Jenny, Loula and Fani, furious fiancée Rita, manic minister Tsiokos, and finally the French President François, who turns out to be an old divorce client of “Maître Charilaos” himself. The truth comes out, the government survives the vote, Loula (more or less) forgives her husband, and Greece is “saved”, while Thanasis, still broke, ends the night dancing his zeibekiko as his song blasts through the speakers.

Character Breakdown

THANASIS VAKONTIOS – The chaotic “Lebowski-Lawyer”

• Role: Central comic engine. Divorce lawyer, self-styled “expert of love” and “specialist in the only surgery that leads to true love: divorces.”

• Traits: Verbose, theatrical, morally flexible but with real underlying ethics; perpetually broke; paranoid about ΔΕΗ, flirting with madness; prone to elaborate riffs and fake personas on the phone.

• Function:

  • Connects the private (divorce) and the public (political crisis).

  • Unwittingly triggers events (prank calls, fake Tsiokos call) and then has to clean up.

  • Ultimately the one who understands the Facebook mix-up and finds a way to “save” both state and marriages.

• Lebowski parallel: He’s more talkative and manic than the Dude, but similar in being a shambolic anti-hero sucked into state-level nonsense that’s way above his paygrade.

LOULA GONATA – The betrayed (and still patriotic) First Lady

• Role: Prime Minister’s wife, client of Thanasis, emotional center of the divorce plot.

• Traits: Emotional, dramatic, politically aware, genuinely patriotic. Torn between her fury as a woman and her sense of duty as “Πρώτη Κυρία.”

• Arc:

  • Starts as a woman ready to burn everything down over betrayal.

  • Torn by guilt when she realizes the timing (vote of confidence, country in crisis).

  • Through the Frontier showdown and Thanasis’s explanation, she shifts from blind rage to a more nuanced view: her husband may be a fool in love but a good prime minister.

  • Ends forgiving (or at least strategically accepting) Thomas, grateful to Thanasis, and re-invested in “saving the country.”

FANI DOUKA – The avenger friend

• Role: Loula’s friend, Thanasis’s old client; the “Greek chorus” of scorned women.

• Traits: Sharp-tongued, vengeful, funny, with a personal history of being cheated on by surgeon Makris. Loves metaphors of blood, knives, and legal revenge.

• Function:

  • Pushes Loula toward divorce and “blood,” uses her own divorce (“Κράμερ εναντίον Κράμερ”) as model.

  • Provides exposition about Thanasis’s methods and about Makris.

  • Gradually begins to suspect things are more complicated with Thomas than they were with her own ex.

THOMAS GONATAS – The Prime Minister

• Role: PM under siege, both politically and domestic-ally.

• Traits: Rational, stressed, sometimes short-tempered, but fundamentally sincere in politics. Weirdly blind to how things look regarding Jenny.

• Arc:

  • Starts trying to manage MPs and vote counts while under a cloud of sexual scandal he doesn’t fully understand.

  • Relies heavily on Tsiokos and Jenny.

  • Through the revelations at Frontier, he learns how fragile his image is and how idiotic the whole “proedros” mess is.

  • Ends politically safe (155+ votes), personally forgiven—ish—by Loula, and oddly in debt to a lunatic lawyer he’s just met.

JENNY – The “bunny” secretary

• Role: Prime Minister’s secretary, “Jennaki-lagoudaki” on Facebook, secretly involved with Orestis.

• Traits: Outwardly sweet, slightly bimbo-ish, but under that she’s crafty and emotionally vivid. Alternates between love-sick, jealous, and hyper-professional.

• Function:

  • The romantic triangle: object of Gonatas’s emotional dependence, Loula’s jealousy, and Orestis’s passionate devotion.

  • One half of the Facebook conversation that caused national scandal.

  • Her reactions to Orestis’s confession at Frontier carry a lot of comedy and tension.

ORESTIS – The overly devoted driver / fake “Proedros”

• Role: PM’s driver, Jenny’s lover, secret Facebook “Proedros.”

• Traits: Loyal, simple, emotionally intense, a bit slow on the uptake, huge heart.

• Function:

  • He’s actually the “president” of the erotic messages, using the PM’s photo.

  • Feeds the scandal by accident.

  • Gets sucked into Thanasis’s “plan” after the car crash.

  • At the end, his emotional plea (“ζήτημα ζωής και θανάτου”) is what gets everyone to follow Thanasis’s directions.

RITA PORTOKALOGLOU – The tragicomic fiancée

• Role: Thanasis’s long-suffering fiancée.

• Traits: Romantic, dramatic, grounded enough to see his bullshit but still in love with him; very attached to family rituals (μαμά’s birthday).

• Arc:

  • Waits for him at Frontier, humiliated in front of her family.

  • Believes his tall tales about being the PM’s lawyer… until everything falls apart.

  • Re-confronts him at Frontier, furious and heartbroken.

  • Then discovers he actually does represent the French President from a past divorce, which makes him accidentally legit.

  • Still chooses “finito,” but with clear emotional residue – it’s not a clean cut.

GEORGE TSIOKOS – The minister / spin doctor

• Role: Cabinet member, PM’s right hand in political numbers and media spin.

• Traits: Talks like a press release; obsessed with bean-counting MPs; weirdly disconnected from the emotional drama.

• Function:

  • Personifies institutional politics versus the chaos around him.

  • Keeps updating the math: 131, 145, 148, 151, 155…

  • The comic contrast: while everyone is in emotional meltdown, he’s still counting and mis-focusing his attention.

FRANÇOIS – The French President

• Role: International cameo, ex-client of Thanasis.

• Traits: Cheerful, flirtatious, broken Greek, loves women and drama.

• Function:

  • Raises the stakes (international dimension).

  • Provides the final twist that retroactively crowns Thanasis as “Maître Charilaos,” the divorce lawyer who freed him from his first Greek wife.

  • Adds one more layer of farce to the ending as he flirts with Loula, Fani, Jenny, and even Rita.

Minor but Colorful

• Sakis the plumber – Offstage most of the time; symbol of everyday Greece: overworked, underpaid, now demanding what he’s owed.

• DEI call center lady (Chrysochoou) – Represents bureaucracy and state absurdity.

• Kyriakos / Kyrazis MP, Alkis, the “troublemaker” MPs – Show the fragility of parliamentary arithmetic and how personal moods can topple governments.