Lucas Bravo has starred in Emily in Paris for four seasons as a hunky, soulful chef, Gabriel. However, the actor recently revealed he’s no longer feeling connected to his character.
The show follows an American woman, Emily (Lily Collins), who moves to Paris after a breakup and for a new career opportunity. When the series premiered in 2020, it immediately became a massive hit for Netflix. According to Variety, 58 million households tuned into the show within its first month.
Bravo is one of the main actors in the series. His character Gabriel is a French chef in a seasons-long “will they won’t they” with Emily, his upstairs neighbor.
Over the past few seasons, Gabriel’s career has grown, and his dating life has seen its ups and downs. While the show is still a major hit for Netflix, Bravo recently revealed that he’s not having “fun” with the direction of his character.
“The ‘sexy chef’ was very much part of me in Season 1 and we grew apart season after season because of the choices he makes and because of the direction they make him take,” Bravo told IndieWire earlier this week. “I’ve never been so far away from him.”
“In Season 1, there was a lot of me in him. But as they made him kind of unaware of his surroundings, of the dynamic, always victimizing and always being completely lost in translation and oblivious to anything that is happening around him and being manipulated by everyone, it kind of became not fun for me to shoot or to see a character I love so much and brought me so much, being slowly turned into guacamole,” he continued. “I really grew apart from him.”
Lucas expressed frustration with not having creative input into Gabriel’s storyline, specifically citing scripts. “I tried for seasons to bring nuances but we don’t have much liberty on set. We cannot change a word or an emotion. They know what they want and we just have to comply,” he said. As a result, he says he’s considering if he wants to appear in Season 5, noting his contract ended following the recently aired fourth season.
“I really want to see if Gabriel gets back to his fun, cheeky, playful, alive self,” he told the publication. “Because three seasons playing melancholic, sad, depressed, and lost is not fun anymore. It’s a comedy, everybody is having fun around me, everybody is jumping around, and I’m just slowly sinking into god knows what.”
Still, Bravo made it clear in the interview that he loves the show and is “grateful” for it.
“It started everything for me. I love the show and the people in it,” he told IndieWire. “With saying that, I feel like I am not being nice or grateful, but when you love something you want it to be…you want the best version of it. I’m not going to lie, I’ve been frustrated with the direction by character is taking. But we’ll see where it goes. The show is not over.”
He’s currently starring in a new film titled Freedom. Based on the life of Bruno Sulak, who Bravo plays, it chronicles a series of French heists in the ’70s and ’80s.
Emily in Paris was renewed for Season 5 in September, but no word just yet on when production will begin. You can read Bravo’s full interview with IndieWire here.
BuzzFeed has reached out to Netflix for comment.
