To Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, Emily in Paris isn’t just a guilty pleasure. Yes, there is Emily’s obsessive print-mixing, and her will-they-won’t-they romance with Gabriel to ogle—but Leroy-Beaulieu thinks of the whole thing more like a giant cake, teeming with layers and flavors. “There’s always that very joyful and playful thing on top of the cake, but there’s some bitter stuff inside the cake now, more and more,” she tells me over Zoom from Rio de Janeiro, where she’s shooting a project. “If you’re paying attention to the clothes, the scenery, beautiful Paris, and nice restaurants, that’s all you’re going to see. But it’s like Sex and the City. There was a deeper thing going on, and there is a deeper thing going on in Emily in Paris, too.”
The Rome-born actress sees the Netflix series ultimately as “a show about loneliness, in a way”—specifically, the loneliness of women. “We can have so many lovers, but then there’s some dryness to that life, which is interesting,” she reflects. Leroy-Beaulieu credits the nuance to Darren Star—who created both this show and Sex and the City—and the way he views the world. “The freedom that women have now is bittersweet,” she says. “It’s like, okay, fun, but what about depth and love?’”
That conflict is pronounced in her on-screen alter ego, the titular Sylvie Grateau, Emily’s (Lily Collins) chic, no-nonsense, marketing-exec boss. While Sylvie has experienced some intense relationships—an affair with her perfumier client, a May-December romance with a photographer, a nightclub-owning husband—she’s also fickle. “She needs that recreational thing around her love life, which, I think, is about solitude, too,” Leroy-Beaulieu offers.
As the quintessential sharp-tongued Parisienne—a natural foil to Lily Collins’s perky, earnest Emily—Sylvie (and Leroy-Beaulieu herself) has resonated with American audiences, picking up where her role as the glamorous wife of a wily agent in the French dramedy Call My Agent!, a word-of-mouth Netflix hit during the pandemic, left off. But Leroy-Beaulieu wants to set the record straight: Her first crossover success was actually in 1984, when she starred in the CBS miniseries Mistral’s Daughter. “It was a French-American production, and it was quite big,” she says. “It was with Stacy Keach, Stefanie Powers, Lee Remick, and that crowd. We filmed in the South of France.” That was also the last time she starred in an English-language series. So, what convinced her to take on Emily in Paris? “Well, Darren [Star], obviously,” she says. “I like storytellers. I like good storytellers.” And she was enamored with Sylvie. “I knew that there was something about Sylvie that I could work with,” she adds. The character had a “toughness” that reminded her of Bette Davis, an actress she’d long admired. “I think I was obsessive with her when I started working on Emily.”
But Sylvie also felt familiar in other ways. When Leroy-Beaulieu was growing up, her mother worked as an accessories and jewelry designer for Dior, so she was surrounded by women from the fashion industry. (Leroy-Beaulieu’s father, Philippe Leroy, was a prodigious French actor.) Many “were really tough, yet very vulnerable, and I like the idea that you’re always hiding your vulnerability under a tough skin,” Leroy-Beaulieu explains. She has “a lot of compassion” for women like that.
And, anyway, she’s of the opinion that being nice is overrated. Sylvie may not be nice, but at her core she’s a “good person”—the far more important thing—and her spikiness pushes Emily to be the best version of herself. “I think good people don’t need to be nice,” Leroy-Beaulieu says. “Good people are good people, and sometimes they need to be tough. And for me, it’s more real than somebody who’s always nice. Somebody who’s always nice is not always a good person.” The actor, like Sylvie, is a truth-teller: She’d rather not sugar-coat or lie. “You might regret it, but the moment you say it, you know that the person needed to hear it for some reason,” she shrugs.
Also like Sylvie, Leroy-Beaulieu has a keen sartorial eye—though she’d describe her own sense of style as “laid-back.” She’s been wearing a lot of Saint Laurent recently—“It’s very simple, very well cut, very sexy, obviously”—but is also drawn to the more “outrageous” offerings of houses like Schiaparelli and Gucci. She channeled Sylvie’s exuberant insouciance at Vogue World: Paris in June, walking the Place Vendôme’s runway in a 1980s-inspired Saint Laurent skirt suit. “They wanted us to have all these huge phones from the ’80s and a briefcase, and I said, ‘No, no briefcase for me,’” she says. At the last minute, she decided to actually play Sylvie as she walked. “I was talking on the phone and doing my Sylvie hand, because I didn’t know what to do.”
But four seasons in, Leroy-Beaulieu still struggles to understand why Sylvie became a fan-favorite. If she’s being honest—which she can hardly avoid, given her innate bluntness—she thought the character would only appeal to older people. And no, she’s not trying to be “modest.” “I guess there’s something about her strength that people like,” she ventures. But she doesn’t want to know exactly what.
As a mature woman who radiates confidence and a healthy appetite for sex, Sylvie has garnered comparisons to another beloved character from Star’s televisual universe: Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones. Leroy-Beaulieu allows that spiritually, the two are “kind of cousins,” though Sylvie’s mores are indivisible from her Frenchness. One day on set, Star remarked that “French women have a lot to teach to us about freedom,” she says, “and I was wondering if it was only sexual freedom, because that’s a legend. French women are free, but American girls also just go everywhere. But it was more about the attitude of being able to own our freedom—not only in [our] sex life, but everywhere else, too.”
While she resists going into detail about her character’s arc in season four, she does offer a hint. “You can expect at the beginning of the show some revenge from something that happened in season three,” she says coyly. “Well, she’s in a bit of a complex fight for a couple [episodes]. That’s all I can say.”
In many ways, the new season is landing at a time when Leroy-Beaulieu could not feel further away from the world of Emily in Paris. At the moment, she is filming an adventure drama in Brazil called 100 Days, based on navigator Amyr Klink’s real-life voyage across the South Atlantic in 1984. (Leroy-Beaulieu, who is co-producing the project, plays Klink’s mother.) It’s been exciting for her to work on a small production, telling a new story in a different country. “It’s about courage and heart, and if you have faith in something, you can do it. And I think we need that kind of story right now,” she says.
But Leroy-Beaulieu isn’t done with Sylvie just yet. Because Star “thinks big,” she has high hopes for whatever’s next. “I want surprises,” she says. “I want Darren to surprise me.”