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, Sylvie Grateau, the titular 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.
Photo: Sarah Krick. Photo assistant: Maggie Overbaugh. Stylist: Clément Lomellini. Stylist assistant: Ciro Marangi. Hair, Owen Gould; makeup, Fred Marin.