Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu’s role as the ballsy PR boss Sylvie has won the French actress many new admirers — including our writer Robert Crampton. So what happened when they met?
We’re in Shoreditch, in the fashionable East End of London, enjoying some rare sunshine in the courtyard of one of the many photography studios hereabouts. Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, whom I’ve decided to refer to as PLB to save space, has just completed a shoot wearing a succession of outfits, each one raunchier and skimpier than the last. “Do you,” I ask, attempting a twinkly, flirtatious tone but managing to sound, I realise later when listening to the recording, both judgy and pushy, “normally dress like that?”
“No,” she says with a smile. “Look at me.” She has changed into jeans, flats and a summer jumper for the interview. It’s a polite answer, given the astounding stupidity of the question, it being hardly likely she pops out for a croissant at home in central Paris wearing six-inch spikes and fishnets. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where she lives, used to be edgy, but not for many decades. A bit like Chelsea.
Mind you, she’s used to it — the heels at least, not the fishnets — in her professional life, playing Sylvie Grateau, the head of a luxury marketing agency in Netflix’s Emily in Paris. “After four seasons my feet are killing me,” she jokes. “All the girls on the show are like, ‘Oh my God, only tennis shoes now.’ " Most women, she admits, don’t go in for vertiginous heels any more. “But Emily in Paris,” she reminds me gently, “is not about reality; it’s about a vision.”
Too true. The show, brainchild of Darren Star, who previously created Beverly Hills, 90210 and Sex and the City, is a glorious campy satire on the Franco-American culture clash, chock full of insanely attractive people in comical haute couture. It features highly saturated primary colours, a breezy chanson soundtrack, texts and tweets racking up likes on screen, lots of fast-paced Parisian montages and a fair amount of sex. Gen Z loves it. So do I. My wife, daughter and I inhaled season three, all 10 episodes, each averaging about half an hour, in one evening just before Christmas 2022. The fourth season, much delayed by first an actors’ then a writers’ strike, finally arrives in mid-August.
Back in Shoreditch, I’m trying ever so tactfully to raise the question of women of PLB’s age, which is 61, wearing outfits traditionally favoured by, er, younger, er, er … “even when you’re in such fantastic shape?” “There are these rules,” she shrugs, “but you don’t have to follow rules. I’m not the kind of person who follows rules. They still exist, but it’s changing — a lot. These days women do whatever they wanna do.” And Emily in Paris is partly about that? “It is. Sylvie’s character is about being free of whatever age you happen to be. She’s also caught up in a lot of contradictions because she’s another generation.”
We are speaking, I should explain, in English, mostly because I can’t speak French, and also because PLB’s command of my mother tongue is almost faultless, a legacy of attending an American school in Rome, where she (mostly) grew up. Her dad, who died last month aged 93, was Philippe Leroy, a French actor who enjoyed much success in Italian cinema in its heyday in the Sixties and Seventies. Her mum, Françoise Laurent, was a model who went on to work at Christian Dior. Young Philippine enjoyed a gilded, bohemian childhood among the Eternal City’s creative elite. Her parents split up, however, when she was 10, and she and her mother left for Paris.
Darren Star originally conceived Sylvie as a much younger character. Following an audition, however, PLB got the gig, in part because, as she puts it, “I know Sylvie. When I was a kid, I was raised in the fashion industry. I saw all these elegant, creative women trying to break the glass ceiling. They were really tough. They had to be. But they were really vulnerable. As a kid I sensed that. I liked them, even though they scared me.”
After a year studying literature at the Sorbonne, PLB dropped out to become an actress, making her debut in Roger Vadim’s Surprise Party in 1983. “Yeah, I got a gig when I was 18, a film by Vadim. Who put me naked. That’s when I understood, ‘No! I’m not doing that.’ But I did do it once.” She doesn’t, she says, want “to get into the whole #MeToo thing”, but also states, “Yeah, it was harder then, in the early Eighties. It was about being an object.
“I experienced the random stuff that happens,” she continues. “You get a script and it’s always, how many sex scenes do you need? Because you know the guys are gonna want to see you naked. [After the Vadim film] I always said no. If you’re scared of not finding a job because you’re not doing what they want, you’re eventually going to do it and find yourself in situations that are horrible. But if you just say, ‘No, this is me. This is my body. This is my personality,’ that’s OK.” Did her career suffer? “Yeah, a little bit, probably. But I prefer my freedom.”
When I push on the (belated) arrival of #MeToo-style revelations and accusations in France, against Gérard Depardieu and other luminaries of French cinema, and discuss how President Macron and many other pillars of the establishment defended Depardieu, she is reluctant to be drawn. “Woah! I don’t want to get into politics at all,” she says. “I don’t like that divide and conquer game. What surprised me,” she adds, “was the reaction of actresses a little older than me. You should help the younger generation to be freer and not be used and abused.”
I ask if, after her initial success in French film, she had been tempted by Hollywood. Her answer is delayed by the departure of the photographer. As PLB gets up to say goodbye, her foot catches the table between us, spilling her coffee which, with the table being made of latticed metal, empties all over my trouser leg (I was tricked out in my dashing new pink suit for the occasion — fat lot of good it did me). Now I feel even less smooth and sophisticated than I did before. Her apologies are profuse. “Ah, you’re covered in coffee,” she laments. I offer a shrug, attempting a Gallic lack of concern for such trivialities. It’s unconvincing.
“Where were we?” she asks rhetorically. “Ah yes, Hollywood. After I did [the 1984 US TV mini-series] Mistral’s Daughter, it was all, ‘Are you going or not going?’ I was like, ‘No, no, no. I’m not going.’ I was a bit scared, I think. Also, I loved European cinema. I’m not against Hollywood but I’m really very European.” That sensibility (the one constantly espoused by Sylvie to Emily) revolves around not being obsessed by material or professional success. “That is my father’s heritage. He thought life was as important as work. Money was never my drive. So I’ve made some choices that were weird — doing dark stuff with Andrzej Wajda in Poland, spending time in Brazil in the Nineties. Travelling. Having experiences. I’m fine the way I am. I’ll see what life brings.” Her next project is a film in Brazil, in Portuguese, in which she is also fluent.
“There have been dips, as happens with all actresses when you get to your forties and beyond, but I am living proof that you can rebuild a career when you are older. I did Call My Agent! and I thought, maybe there will be more interesting stuff after all.” It helped, she says, that television has become superbly good. “Yes! Succession is a masterpiece… It’s Shakespeare.”
When Emily in Paris first came out, during lockdown in 2020, the French press were not best pleased at what they saw (correctly) as poking fun at their culture. Have they chilled out since then? “Yeah, they were offended, but I told them, you don’t even have a sense of humour. We’re making fun of Americans as much as the French. They didn’t get that. They don’t have a sense of humour, the French. There is not a lot of self-deprecation going on.”
And as for the stereotypes, I say, many of them are true: as in Parisian waiters really are the rudest people on earth. “They are,” she agrees. And you do smoke a lot and have affairs… “And we do drink wine,” she continues, lighting another cigarette. The French, I say, have taken a different route from much of the rest of the West. “Yeah, we want to live, not only work. Americans, they don’t have a life. It’s sad. That’s what I’m trying to tell Emily all the time. Have a life!”
After three seasons, she says, “They get the joke a little more. They’re not upset any more. They like it. Even the people who say they don’t like it, they all watch it. It’s a guilty pleasure. They’re very snobby. I love them — there’s this good side about the French — but coming from Rome I could see the rudeness, and how closed they were.”
In France, I say, I often get the feeling I have caused offence without knowing why. Like Madame in the boulangerie — one day she’s fine, the next she acts as if you’ve committed a subtle yet grotesque faux pas. She laughs. “Maybe she’s upset about something else — it’s not about you but she’s going to make it about you.”
If PLB is less than zealous in defence of her compatriots, that is partly because she is something of an Anglophile. “My daughter lives in East Sussex. I come here a lot. I love the English. I love the sense of humour here. I have a blast when I’m here, so much fun. There are so many things about England I love.” Her daughter, Taïs Bean, 33, an artist with an English partner, is her only child. Philippine is no longer with the father. Indeed, she is not with anyone. Does she date? “No.”
A silence. “What else do you want to know?” she asks. I tell her I’ll keep asking personal questions until she asks me to stop. “You are nosey?” That’s precisely the word, I say, and ask her why she doesn’t date. “I’ve been working a lot.”
I read somewhere that she thinks men are scared of her, post-Sylvie. “Yes, and women too. Sylvie is only part of me! And Sylvie is layered. She is tough, but she’s vulnerable.” She is suffering, she thinks, not just from the old sexist slur that a successful woman must be a bitch. “When you’re hypersensitive you have to be tough, to protect yourself. Otherwise what? You’re just gonna cry all the time? You need armour to protect yourself from this s**** world. You have to say no. You have to have boundaries. Because people try to get you all the time.”
Does she think men look at her and see Sylvie? “I don’t know. I should ask them: do you see Sylvie in me?” But even if they did, they shouldn’t be frightened? “Yeah, well, I think a good man, a mensch, is not afraid of a strong woman. Are there enough good men?” I say maybe not; a lot of men seem to be reacting badly to the empowerment of women. “Yes, and men my age…” If he’s available, there’s generally a problem, right? “Yeah! There’s no hope for me.” But she’s not even looking? “No, I’ve never looked for anything. It’ll come.”
And if not, she strikes me as someone perfectly happy with her own company, her own identity, less complicated than Sylvie yet every bit as much in control. The secret of her figure and fitness, she says, is “trampolining. Ten minutes every morning. Unless I had too much to drink and just want to lie on the sofa.” There is also a lot of yoga, Pilates, cycling and walking, around Paris and at a holiday home in Normandy. “I was raised in Italy so I’m used to eating real food that I can recognise, not processed food. That’s the basic. I love good wine. I don’t eat red meat apart from very good Italian ham. And I move a lot because my father was such a crazy mover.”
Having served as a decorated paratrooper in both the Indochina and Algerian wars, her father took up skydiving again as a hobby in later life, only stopping when he was 85. “He was a huge character, very strong — he wanted to prove himself all the time.” She did a tandem skydive herself 10 years ago. “It was crazy! I understood my dad. I was, ‘Oh I get it. I want to do it again.’ " I tell her I did a jump once. She nods politely.
Why, I ask eventually, is Emily in Paris such a hit? “It’s escapism. That was important in lockdown, but it’s still the case — the world hasn’t got any better, has it? There’s the fashion. And it’s layered; it’s knowing. Darren has a talent for the fun and the frothy, but with other themes going on as well. We have fun but people always think we’re having a blast all the time, but it’s like music: you’ve got to be disciplined. Comedy is hard.”
Also, never underestimate the appeal of presenting Paris as the ultimate fantasy city. She is good friends with Bruno Gouery, who plays her eccentric employee, Luc. “I love him. He lives quite close. We hang out. Tourists are always amazed when they see us in the street. It happened yesterday in a shop. This American guy says, ‘Are you Sylvie? Oh my God, it’s my first day in Paris and I’ve met Sylvie.’ " Does Paris, I ask finally, her Eurostar departure beckoning, really look as good as your show depicts it? “It looks good,” she says, all but winking, “but we make it look even better.”
- Emily in Paris series four starts on Netflix on August 15; part two follows on September 12
Written by: Robert Crampton
© The Times of London