“Something crazy happened to me the other day,” Lucas Bravo says as he sits al fresco at Swingers, the diner that’s a longtime staple along Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood, on a sticky August day.
He explains it was about 5 a.m. and he was jetlagged after traveling to L.A. from Paris, where he lives, to promote the new season of “Emily in Paris.” Unable to sleep, Bravo linked up with a friend and drove to a beach, where he was approached with an unusual request.
“As we park, a Range Rover pulls up and this woman is like, ‘Hey, are you doing anything?’” Bravo recalls. “She was like, ‘Listen, if you have 10 minutes, I’ll give you money so you can serve someone [legal papers]. Basically, it’s for custody of my kids; I’m in the middle of a divorce and these are papers to serve to my mother-in-law.’”
“I’m a people pleaser,” he continues, “so I’m like, how do I get out of this? And I’m an Aries, so I jump in the pool and then I learn how to swim. But, also, I mean, I don’t want to serve a grandmother. My friend got me out of it. But what if I was alone? I probably would have done it.”
This is what it’s like, getting lost in the tales of a French guy who’s in Los Angeles. But, for the record, his alter ego may still have the edge on experiencing surprising and dramatic life moments.
Netflix’s frothy series began as a fish-out-of-water story about a bright-eyed American marketing executive living in Paris, and Bravo eventually emerged as the show’s swoon-worthy leading man playing Gabriel, the chef with a heart of gold who ends up in a divisive love triangle with Emily (Lily Collins). Being a show that comes from the mind of Darren Star, a master at crafting messy relationships, it was only a matter of time before things got très compliqué.
After getting his professional life on track — opening a restaurant and devoting himself to earning a Michelin star — Gabriel’s personal life goes off the rails when his last-minute wedding to on-again, off-again girlfriend Camille (Camille Razat) is called off because of his feelings for Emily. But wait, Camille is pregnant? Not so fast. Part 1 of the fourth season, which was released last month, finally saw Gabriel and Emily rekindle their romance just as his chance at a coveted Michelin star implodes. And Camille? Well, it turns out she isn’t pregnant after all — but she’s withholding the news from Gabriel.
Bravo is coy about the second half of the season, now streaming, offering chuckles that signal his character’s roller-coaster journey is bracing for another drop. “Darren knows how to bring the chaos,” he says.
Still, even Bravo was surprised by recent story developments, particularly Camille’s pregnancy. “I was like, ‘Wow, it’s a big shift. This might be my cue,’” he says, jokingly implying the uncertain fate he thought it held for his character. But Bravo came into the fourth season appreciating the relief his character would get from the scrapped wedding and the other curve balls that knocked Gabriel off course.
Netflix’s “Emily in Paris” returns “Sex and the City” creator Darren Star to the City of Light — and pays subtle homage to the earlier series’ romantic finale.
“I’m a simple person,” he says. “I don’t think I can handle that pressure on a daily basis. [Gabriel’s] the same. So, there’s this big, big, big relief. I don’t know how he’s gonna take the baby news because he seems very pumped, to say the least.”
The notion of being freed from expectations is something Bravo knows well. It’s what’s brought us to Swingers — and why this story isn’t about a lawyer.
At 18, after his first semester at law school, he joined a friend for a quick getaway to L.A. He crashed at the West Hollywood home of a friend’s father, the filmmaker Jean-Christophe “Pitof” Comar, director of 2003’s “Catwoman.” His “first taste of America,” as he tells it, involved spending much of that week on a loop, walking to the Grove, L.A.’s outdoor shopping hub, and grabbing a Red Bull and a pack of Parliament cigarettes.
Unable to afford a taxi on his last day in town, he asked his friends to give him a ride to the airport. They declined as a tactic to get him to stay. He did, for five years.
Just Lucas in Los Angeles.
“I was pursuing myself; I was trying to land into myself and understand myself,” he says. Sitting across from Bravo, there’s a sense that he’s still on that path. He’s contemplative and slightly self-conscious as he talks about himself, and measured when he reveals intimacies like how, growing up, he just wanted to make friends “to gather love” because his parents didn’t verbalize it a lot. (He’s careful to note he has a good relationship with them.)
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1. “Emily in Paris” star Lucas Bravo. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
He dropped out of law school. His parents stopped talking to him during that time. He couldn’t work because he didn’t have a visa. But he had a roof over his head. And he’d bum cash off of friends to survive when the funds his grandmother occasionally sent ran low.
“Every day, I would ask a different friend for a couple of bucks and go to Taco Bell and get the 99 cent cheesy double beef burrito,” he says. “And Swingers — I haven’t been here in a long time — but it was a quick walk from the house. My friends and I would sit in a booth and they would order stuff and I would look at it, like, ‘that looks good.’ And my friends would be like, ‘order a Coke, order a burger.’ So, Swingers, for me, represented friendship and generosity and the biggest meals I had for the first three years after having nothing.”
There was some romance, too. He shares a story of the time he walked from West Hollywood to Pacific Palisades — about a 16-mile journey — for a date: “It took me six hours,” he says. “At some point, there are no sidewalks. You feel like you’re gonna die. She opened the door, and she was like, ‘You’re late. ‘Gossip Girl’ started already.’”
Contrary to the cliche, he wasn’t bitten by the acting bug while he was here. He didn’t act at all in that time. But being the son of a professional soccer player (Daniel Bravo), and moving every few years, unlocked the performer in him at an early age, he says.
Darren Star, creator of Netflix’s “Emily in Paris,” reflects on a 30-year career that includes “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Melrose Place” and “Sex and the City.”
“With every new school, I had the ‘new guy’ status,” he says. “Subconsciously, I think it was a defense mechanism. I started really being very perceptive about group dynamics and patterns of people. I would know exactly the beat to fit into and lose the ‘new guy’ status as fast as possible.”
So when Bravo’s mother enrolled him in acting school at 15, he felt there was something safe about a script. “It felt like a blueprint for a human being — here is how to be, how to talk, how to think,” he says.
For Bravo, going to law school felt like the “normal” track to be on — one that his brother pursued. It also seemed that being a lawyer required a certain amount of performance to get a jury on your side. (And it’s why being asked to serve legal papers felt like a jolt to the senses.) But once he returned home, he enrolled in a more formal acting school, working in restaurants and supermarkets along the way.
While stopping for a sandwich on his last day of classes, he ran into an old friend who was working as an agent and offered to send him some scripts. One was “Emily in Paris.”
A fan of Star’s work, particularly “Sex and the City,” which Bravo credits for both his sexual education and his ability to speak English, the actor was eager to audition. He made it through several rounds, but the show’s bosses were ambivalent because of his inexperience and they moved on. Feeling defeated, Bravo took a trip to Corsica, where he had little cell service, and spent time hiking and making goat cheese. He later was greeted with a flurry of missed calls and texts asking him to come back for another round, he thought, to play one of Emily’s other love interests.
According to Star, from the beginning, he saw something in Bravo on tape and in person that remained top of mind as they neared production on the first season. The hesitation of casting an inexperienced actor as the male lead dissipated.
“We brought him back and he read with Lily — the chemistry was undeniable,” Star says. “He just has this natural charisma and this twinkle in his eye and an amazing sense of humor. I just wanted to go with my gut.”
“Emily in Paris” became Bravo’s first major professional job. So, what is it like becoming the heartthrob of a popular TV series on a global platform overnight?
“It’s hard to feel legitimate to that level of visibility and attention, especially overnight,” he says. “I’m at the early stage of my career and global visibility doesn’t mean experience. It doesn’t mean you’re established. So, the imposter syndrome that I had just exploded.”
But Collins says she senses Bravo has figured out how to not be overwhelmed by it.
“This season, I saw a new sense of freedom and enjoyment from Lucas as he just leaned into it all and had more fun,” she says.
At 36, he’s been reflecting on questions about self and purpose, and how he wants to keep stretching as a performer. He grows more animated as he considers how he’s reaching opportunities that didn’t seem possible all those years back when he frequented this diner.
Since “Emily in Paris,” he’s played other dreamboats on the big screen, including in “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” and the George Clooney and Julia Roberts comedy “Ticket to Paradise,” but more recently, he’s taken on roles that stand in stark contrast.
“The Balconettes,” which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and is slated for a fall release, is a French comedy horror film about three Marseilles roommates and their flirtation gone awry with the cute guy across the street (Bravo) during a heat wave. He’ll also portray French criminal Bruno Sulak, known as the “gentleman bandit,” this fall in Melanie Laurent’s “Freedom,” which will be released by Prime Video. And he’ll star in a prequel of “Dangerous Liaisons” for the French HBO platform.
Still, Bravo’s learning how to be comfortable in his skin — literally — as he takes on new challenges because having to show his body provokes a specific kind of dread. He knew that signing up as the love interest in “Emily” might require showing a bit of skin. And there are nude scenes in “The Balconettes,” and in some of his other projects. His relationship with food has been an issue since childhood — he recalls a lock being put on the refrigerator because he would eat a lot.
At 59, the breakout star of Netflix’s Parisian confection is playing a role written for a woman 20 years younger. So far, the challenge fits her like a glove.
“Food became a reward and a stress habit,” he says, noting the pressure that came with being the son of a regimented soccer player.
For “The Balconettes,” he worked with a fitness coach for two months, waking up every morning to box and eating things like apples and tuna. Once the project wrapped, and with some more relaxed eating around the holidays, the anxiety returned as filming for the fourth season of “Emily in Paris” neared and his physique, he says, wasn’t as fit. An early scene from the season, where he’s in the shower, called for him to be shirtless and panic set in, he says.
“I go to set and my chef costume doesn’t really fit,” he says. “There’s a side shot, and you can see that I’m [looking like I’m] three months pregnant.”
It made Bravo nervous about what another episode would bring: “Are they going to have a scene where I need to be shirtless next to Alfie, who is literally sculpted in marble?”
But he’s learning to give himself more grace, he says. While his alter ego has recently been focused on work and chasing a Michelin star, Bravo says he’s chasing peace of mind and acceptance. As for the future, he hopes to direct in the next couple of years. With some help, he’s written his own fish-out-of-water love story that takes place at an amusement park in Japan.
“What I’m searching for is the type of atmosphere you get in ‘Lost in Translation’ or ‘Perfect Days,’” he says. “We’re in this world of TikTok and 10-second videos. I want people to be able to sit and digest. That’s the kind of movie I would like to make.”
For now, though, he’s offered to pay for lunch at Swingers because he can afford it. (But we beat him to it.)
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