After four seasons playing Netflix’s favorite heartthrob, the French actor is ready to go against type
Words by ROB HASKELL
Photography by JACK WATERLOT
Styling by MARY INACIO
After the hit first season of Emily in Paris, when Lucas Bravo found himself clamoring to play anything but the role of sexy Parisian neighbor that made him a famous heartthrob, his manager offered this advice: Give people time to enjoy their first impression of you before you smash it to bits.
On the eve of season four, as the Emily press push takes over Los Angeles for a week in the dog days of August, Bravo certainly does not look like an actor pandering to his audience. He arrived in the city a few days early and has taken a room at the Hotel Cara, a sleek oasis in a gritty Hollywood no man’s land just west of Thai Town and south of Griffith Park. Over the weekend, he will decamp to the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills for official duties and for a version of L.A. that doesn’t exactly excite his imagination.
“I’m kind of owning the city before the city owns me,” he says. Bravo’s hair is long and messy, his cheek is heavy with stubble — in short, there is little imprint of the clean and coiffed Gabriel, a chef, in his current presentation. As if to prove the point, Bravo does something flagrantly un-French: He orders an omelet for breakfast.
“It felt very ironic for me to have a breakthrough with a boy-next-door role,” he says of his character, the periodic love interest of Lily Collins’ Emily. “He’s supposed to be confident and sexy and everything that I’m not. I never had game. I’d never want to get into someone’s bubble if I’m not invited in.” Although the French love to hate Emily in Paris for its prettily wrapped chocolate box of French stereotypes, Bravo has always identified with the fish-out-of-water story that is at the show’s core.
“Acting was the only thing that vibrated in my soul. Even though I was broke, everything felt possible.”
Lucas Bravo
Born in Nice, Bravo spent his childhood bouncing around to accommodate the career of his professional soccer player father — to Lyon, Marseille, and Paris, then to Parma, Italy, and back to the South of France. “I always had a distance,” he recalls. “I remember my friends would have a collection of their class photos, the same people every year. I didn’t have that. I always felt out of place, but that’s how I started to — as a defense mechanism — analyze dynamics and patterns of people in order to fit in quickly, to not be the new guy as fast as possible. The South of France is very warm. People are very accessible, and it’s easy to make friends. Paris, where I finished high school, was kind of a slap in the face. I arrived with that energy of the south and was confronted with walls. So I knew what the show was going for.”
At 18, and not with any great conviction, Bravo enrolled in law school in France. But during a break in his first year, a friend invited him to Los Angeles. What was supposed to be a two-week vacation lasted five years. In L.A. they were received by the son of Pitof, the French director best known for his 2004 flop Catwoman. While Pitof was in China looking to redeem his career, his son and his friends took over a house on Laurel Avenue in West Hollywood. “I had been very protected by my family for many years,” Bravo says, “and all of a sudden I had all this freedom. For me it was the beginning of life.”
When Bravo told his parents he intended to leave law school in order to act, they were mystified. Although his grandmother would occasionally send over a couple of hundred euros, he was always on the financial brink. He remembers asking a different friend every day for a dollar so he could go to Taco Bell and order the 99-cent cheesy double beef burrito, his daily meal. “Acting was the only thing that vibrated in my soul,” he says. “Even though I was broke, everything felt possible. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that feeling again.”
While Bravo’s big break, on Emily, didn’t come until he turned 30, he does not look at the first decade of his acting career with self-pity. He recalls the “double humiliation” of going to parties, explaining he was an actor, and, in the next breath, saying no, his interlocutor probably had not seen him in anything because he hadn’t been in anything. “But,” he says, “I think that calling yourself a struggling actor is a good way to stay one for a long time. Being an actor can’t be defined by success or celebrity. If it vibrates within you, if it’s a need, if discovering who a character is helps you to discover who you are, if it’s therapeutic, then it’s worth it. I think we’re all hurt or traumatized and are looking for answers within acting, or maybe for a massive amount of love within a short amount of time. For actors there’s always a void to fill. Today we’re being sold the idea that we can have everything all at once, so we feel like choosing is renouncing an infinity of other possibilities. But it’s when you choose, when you commit, when you engage, that life starts happening.”
“It’s when you choose, when you commit, when you engage, that life starts happening.”
Lucas Bravo
This year, Bravo finally dared to disrupt the safe and comfortable persona that Emily has lent him. He has recently wrapped on a French-language prequel to Dangerous Liaisons opposite Diane Kruger. In September he stars as a fashion photographer at the center of a summer night of sex and violence in the dark comedy The Balconettes. Later in the fall, he plays a jewel thief in Mélanie Laurent’s Freedom. After four seasons of Emily, with its brand of no-hair-out-of-place physical perfection, Bravo relished the naturalism of Laurent’s directing and her celebration of the “gestures of life,” those small and inelegant movements that real people make and that don’t usually make their way to the screen.
“In season four of Emily, within the script of being the sexy neighbor, I tried everywhere there was space to take out the sexiness and the French-ness and everything they wanted me to be. Life is imperfect, with mistakes and clumsiness. I infused a lot of that energy into season four, and I kind of made it my favorite season. It’s funny — at the end Lily was like, ‘I don’t know what happened this season, but I loved what you did with our couple.’ That felt great.”
It has been nearly two decades since Bravo felt like an outsider in Paris. He is a resident of the 11th arrondissement and a passionate proponent of life in neighborhoods without all the flashy tourist attractions. “I grew up near the Arc de Triomphe, in the core of what Paris represents to the rest of the world,” he says. “The 11th is perfect because it feels like a village. Things need to be tiny: your interaction with your coffee place, your vinyl store. It took me decades to find it, but there are parts of Paris where the dynamics are different and people are more welcoming — what I call the real Paris, where the monuments are not and where the tourists don’t go. When my friends from L.A. come to visit, I push them to discover that Paris. In every city, if you’re with the right people and go to the right places, you’ll have that warm feeling.”
“To stay sane in the industry you need to turn it off, which isn’t easy when you’re with someone else in the industry.”
Lucas Bravo
Bravo is newly single, having recently ended a three-year relationship with another actor whom he does not name. He says he understands why actors often date one another — no one outside the orbit quite understands it — but conflicting schedules and the high stakes of every reunion can spell doom. “You’re in different countries, and then you have 24 hours to reconnect,” he says. “It’s so much pressure to be the best version of yourself. Every gesture is overinterpreted. To stay sane in the industry you need to turn it off, which isn’t easy when you’re with someone else in the industry.”
When he lived in L.A., Bravo frequented Swingers, the West Hollywood diner. Free refills — unknown in France — were something of a revelation to his teenage self. These days, when he can, Bravo prefers to avoid the showbiz core of the city in favor of its edges: Silver Lake to the east, Venice to the west. He unzips his sweater to show off a T-shirt from Sqirl, Jessica Koslow’s famed Virgil Village café. He is no less a fan of the monthly First Friday food truck night on Abbot Kinney. Bravo loves Sugarfish and KazuNori, In-N-Out, and the occasional cannabis e-cig at a local dispensary. “It’s legal here, and I like to contribute to that evolution,” he says.
Bravo’s Paris may be a lot cozier than the one that greeted Emily, but there’s no competing with Southern California when it comes to friendly neighbors. “In L.A.,” he says, “when you pass someone on the street and there’s eye contact, you say, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ I don’t think we’ll ever do that in Europe.”
Grooming by JAMIE TAYLOR at A-Frame Agency.
Set design by ZORAN RADANOVICH.
Vehicle provided by MR. VINTAGE MACHINE.
Shot on location at TOPANGA CREATIVE ACRES.
LUCAS BRAVO wears POLO RALPH LAUREN x NAIOMI GLASSES.
Feature image: POLO RALPH LAUREN jacket, $498, and pants, $248. GRENSON BRADY boots, $495. T-shirt, stylist’s own. Ring (worn throughout), stylist’s own.
This story originally appeared in the Fall Men’s Edition 2024 issue of C Magazine.
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