PARIS – “Emily in Paris” fans will get a few surprises in their Christmas stockings, when the third season of the hit show arrives on Netflix this Wednesday.
Even the cast were shocked by the number of cliffhangers in the new series when they first read the scripts.
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“I’m like, how are we going to film all — like, what?” says Lily Collins, who portrays the titular American marketing executive making her social media presence felt in France.
“But it was a real ride. It was a real rollercoaster to shoot. And it was really fun too,” she adds.
Season three provides more career choices, designer dilemmas and romantic revelations for the fashionable female lead character.
Although Lucas Bravo — who portrays Emily’s full-time neighbor and sometime love interest, the chef Gabriel — reckons that she isn’t the only one wrestling with problems this series.
“Before it was only Emily’s chaos,” says Bravo. “Now everybody has his own story with his own chaos. And it’s a big soup of chaos and drama.”
Season one arrived in October 2020, followed by a second last December. Three years into playing their characters, the cast members are keen to point out where their roles start and finish.
Collins — who is also an executive producer — says that she has always fit in better than Emily in France because she actually knows the language and culture.
Which, with Emily's questionable French pronunciation, leads to tongue twisters.
“It’s a little bit difficult to pretend like you don’t know how to say something,” Collins explains. “To mispronounce it over and over and over again, it’s like ... I just want to answer it fully in French. So it is tricky.”
Kate Walsh plays Emily's American boss Madeline and would like everyone to know that she has very different taste in clothing from her brash and brightly colored character.
“I would never dress like that. But I love it because it’s critical to the character,” Walsh says.
Likewise, Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu claims there’s a stark difference between her and her role of Sylvie, Madeline’s trop chic Parisian business rival.
Leroy-Beaulieu says she’s nowhere near as snobbish, even though Sylvie's arrogant attitude is “so much fun.”
But Bravo, in a twist, reckons that all the actors are more like their characters than they realize: “What’s so good about (showrunner) Darren (Star’s) casting is that he always finds, you know, actors that are the essence of the characters. So there’s always a part of us in every character.”
“I don’t know what the differences are. I think I would own up to my mistakes a bit more than Gabriel. But we’re very similar in many ways in terms of vulnerability, femininity and sexiness in general,” he jokes.
The third season will encompass 10 episodes.
“If you like chaos, you’ll be served,” Bravo promises.