Paris is always a good idea. But it is a particularly good idea at seven o’clock on a Thursday evening in late August. Especially at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, a Beaux Arts jewel box in the middle of the city currently home to a Schiaparelli retrospective, for which Parisians are queuing long into aperitif hour. Tonight, the museum is also hosting one specific, very recognisable—or at least, very recognisable to Francophiles with an escapist bent who also have a Netflix subscription—fashion fan: Emily Cooper.
The third season of Emily in Paris is well underway when I visit. “I feel like I know the city now,” gushes Ashley Park, who plays Emily’s best friend Mindy, rattling off her favourite wine bars. Earlier this week, Lily Collins and Lucien Laviscount, who plays Emily’s new paramour Alfie, got hot and heavy on the Tuileries ferris wheel; tomorrow, they will head up the Eiffel Tower. Later, Laviscount teases, even “greater heights” will be crested. (He’s talking about a hot air balloon.) “We get the best locations,” shares Stephen Joel Brown, Emily in Paris’s jovial producer. He is the show’s Miss Congeniality—“Have you met Stephen yet?” several people ask, with the urgency of introducing me to a head of state—even more than fan favourite Park or Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, who stars as Emily’s ice cold patron Sylvie but in real life, everyone assures me, is très charmant. I glimpse her only at a distance inside the Musée, in a plunging black gown, waiting to shoot a confrontation with Kate Walsh’s Madeline. She catches my eye and beams.
Filming in the Eiffel Tower is the Emily in Paris equivalent of bringing back Jon Snow from the dead on Game of Thrones. The series has filmed near it, around it, at the foot of it, romantically gazing upon it, twinkling, from the viewing platform of a bateau mouche gliding softly down the Seine, but Emily in Paris has never actually shot inside its titular city’s most iconic landmark. It took three seasons but they’ve finally secured the tower, a sign that Emily in Paris is big business, after season two clocked up more than 100 million viewing hours. Its greatest strength, aside from being reliably effervescent television, is that it is so clearly made in actual Paris, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And Paris is always a good idea.
This is essentially the central premise of Emily in Paris, which has followed Collins’s character for three seasons as the city unlocks all of life’s possibilities. This is Laviscount’s central premise, too. He had never been to Paris before he was cast—“It’s like Lucien in Paris, and Netflix is paying me to be here,” he sums up cheerfully—now, he’s scoping out apartments to live part-time. “Even though my French is disgusting and doesn’t exist, but I really try,” he moans, slouched on a sofa in a corner of the Musée. “I realised I was going around saying ‘Merci beau cul’ the whole time, which actually means ‘Thank you, nice bum.’ And no one corrected me!” Maybe they took it as a compliment, I suggest. “Not when you’re in an Uber!” he yelps, with what I can only describe as the world’s cheekiest grin.
Laviscount returns in season three as a bona fide member of the Emily in Paris gang. “I wouldn’t say I’m the big dog, but I’m at the bowl,” he declares. He describes the new series as “Friends in Paris; it’s all very interconnected,” and hints that there’s “something else aside from Lily” that brings Alfie back to town. “The more you get to know about Alfie, the more mysterious he gets,” Laviscount reflects, enigmatically. It’s true. Why does this man who purports to hate Paris continue to live there? And how on earth is Emily going to choose between the gorgeous Alfie with his straightforward charm and the gorgeous Gabriel (Lucas Bravo), a French chef with perfect bone structure?
“I don’t think it’s really competition,” Laviscount gamely counters. The difference between the pair, he believes, is the way they communicate. “Gabriel shelters his feelings a little bit more,” Laviscount offers. “Alfie is just a straight-up guy, if he wants something he’ll go and get it and if it’s not working for him, like, peace out.” As a character, Alfie veers painfully close to fuckboy territory, but Laviscount, I can assure you, has an adorably soft centre. His favourite Paris memory is “walking down the Seine at sunset”. “It’s so romantic,” he tells me earnestly, with … a lot … of eye contact.
Minutes later, I’m following Laviscount and Park, arm in arm, across the Rue de Rivoli to the Hotel Regina, where a suite has been booked for Park to dress for a photo shoot. People are staring. Yes, Park is still wearing the Baywatch-cut sequin bodysuit from her photo shoot, but it’s also the effect of seeing the pair together in their cinematic home. “Ashley is like the team leader,” Laviscount shares. She’s the one with the best restaurant recommendations, the friendliest advice and is always down for a night on the town, including the time she took Laviscount to Café Charlot—“our spot!” he exclaims—for a drink after the first table read and it turned into “one of the best nights I’ve ever had”. Everyone on Emily in Paris adores her. Bravo and Samuel Arnold, who plays Emily’s colleague Julien, moved into her apartment in season one. This time, Park and Collins are living in the same building. After work, they usually convene in one of their flats and sit together in companionable, contented silence.
Park takes her role as television’s pre-eminent best friend very seriously. “I can’t tell you how many times people come up to me,” she reflects, “and be like, ‘Oh my god, hey, how are you doing?’ People think that they know me.” So much so that Park doesn’t correct them. (“I also have a bad memory,” she jokes.) For Park, it’s a true honour. “It’s not about the recognition and the fame,” she explains. “I can’t believe so many people associate music, joy and friendship with me.”
Like Laviscount, Park arrived in Paris for the first time to make the series. “I had left everything I knew,” she shares. “I’m from the Broadway world. I never dreamed in a million years that I would be on a television show.” Park turned 30 on the second season, and so much of “reaching adulthood” is wrapped up in Emily in Paris, from her friendship with Collins to the way her career has shifted into high gear. (She has just wrapped the lead role in a comedy directed by Crazy Rich Asians writer Adele Lim.) “It also has really helped me deeply understand my value as a person,” Park adds. She shares that all of her friends came to visit during production and each of them went through “a big shift” after leaving: a relationship began or ended, a new job or apartment was secured. “I think it’s because when you come to a place like this, you really open up to the universe, and maybe that’s what happened to me.”
At the end of season two, Mindy reminds Emily that “this isn’t just a fun year abroad anymore, this is your life”. “We really see that come to fruition in season three,” reveals Park. And part of real life is the not-so-glossy stuff. “Emily and Mindy find a way to be like: we’re both changing, and this is how we’re going to progress this friendship,” she explains. “It’s not obstacles in any way, but I think we get to see dimension from that friendship.”
Back on set, the confrontation between Sylvie and Madeline—with Emily peacekeeping in Pierre Cadault couture—is in full swing. Madeline needs Sylvie’s help, Sylvie wants nothing to do with her Midwestern overlords. The sequence is a showcase for both Collins’s uncanny resemblance to Audrey Hepburn—she is debuting a gamine short fringe this season—and her impeccable comedic timing, her face twisting effortlessly into conciliatory smiles and awkward grimaces. Collins catches each improvisation thrown at her by Walsh, who plays Madeline with increasingly manic levels of desperation, and runs with it. At the end of the fourth take, producer Darren Star—the creator of Emily in Paris and some other television you might have heard of, like Sex and the City—has the smile of a man who has seen Netflix’s top-secret ratings numbers.
“That’s a good one,” he proclaims. Cut!
Editor
Hannah-Rose Yee
