The first trailer for “Étoile,” the new ballet inspired show from Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino, the team behind “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Gimore Girls,” is here — and there is one very thrilling Jewish star at its center.
In the show, Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Geneviève, the interim general director of l’Opera Francais and Le Ballet National, the national ballet company of France. Her dancers are impeccable, her finances less so. Enter Luke Kirby (aka Lenny Bruce from “Maisel”) as Jack, executive director of the Metropolitan Ballet Theater in New York, which could use some more skill and critical admiration, but is definitely widely beloved. The two decide on an unprecedented move to hopefully keep their dance companies alive — exchanging some of their most successful dancers with the other company to freshen things up and draw in new audiences.
“Étoile,” the French word for star used to label a dance troupe’s lead dancer, is Sherman-Palladino’s second show about ballet, following the fan favorite but short lived “Bunheads” in which Sutton Foster played a Vegas dancer turned small town ballet teacher. Just like “Maisel,” for which she drew inspiration from her Jewish father, an aspiring comedian, the show takes inspiration from the director, writer and producer’s life.
“I trained as a dancer, so I have been mystified that nothing has really come close to capturing the weirdness of the dance world. They’re an odd, amazing bunch of people,” Sherman-Palladino shared. “I stopped dancing the minute I realized somebody was going to actually pay me to do something, and I could have a sandwich. [But] my whole life, I’ve known [that] without ballet, the world is a lesser place. And a place that I don’t think a lot of people want to be in, even if they don’t realize it.” The show is the Palladinos’ ode to what they believe is a now endangered art form, deeply impacted by the pandemic and changing times.
Inspired also by the dance documentaries of Jewish American director Frederick Wiseman, the show hopes to capture “the tough world behind this very delicate art form.” Aside from Kirby and Gainsbourg, the show also stars Gideon Glick as Tobias Bell, a “rising star choreographer whose quirky theatrics don’t easily translate to French sensibilities.” Celebrated French actress Lou de Laâge plays a chutzpadick French ballerina who needs to deal with the cross-Atlantic shift. David Alvarez, Ivan du Pontavice, Taïs Vinolo, David Haig, LaMay Zhang and Simon Callow also star in the show. Yanic Truesdale, who many know and love as Michel from “Gilmore Girls,” is a recurring guest.
The show marks a fairly big career change for Gainsbourg. The actress is best known stateside for her roles in Lars Von Trier movies like “Melancholia” and “Nymphomaniac.” But in France, she’s been an icon since childhood. At age 12 she recorded an incredibly controversial duet with her father, Jewish French singer Serge Gainsbourg, titled “Lemon Incest” (17 years earlier, her mother, British actress Jane Birkin, recorded her own infamous duet with Gainsbourg, “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus.”) Like her father, Gainsbourg has a pretty prolific musical career and has released multiple French-language albums. She’s starred in countless of films, quite a few with Jewish themes — many of those were directed by her partner of over four decades, Yvan Attal. Attal was born in Tel Aviv and is the son of French Algerian Jews. He and Gainsbourg have three kids, including actor Ben Attal, who along with his mother starred in Attal’s 2021 film “The Accusation.” Yvan also directed the 2016 movies “The Jews,” a comedy that spotlighted antisemitism in France.
“I identified as a Jew growing up and now I’m married to a Jew,” Gainsbourg told the Forward in 2019. “His parents celebrate the Jewish holidays. So, that’s still very much part of me.”
Despite her very lengthy resume, “Étoile” will be Gainsbourg’s first English-language comedy TV show. “For me, it was very new to do a comedy in English. I’ve done comedies in France, and still people see me as a serious actress — but I love comedies,” Gainsbourg told Vanity Fair.
“She’s just annoyingly cool,” Sherman-Palladino told Vanity Fair about Ginsbourg. “In my wildest dreams, I could never be that cool. It’s like walking down the street and Lenny Kravitz is standing there. You go, ‘God damn it, just go away.’ Charlotte shows up with her trench coat and T-shirt and unbrushed hair, and I’m like, ‘Fuck, I’ll never be able to carry it like that.’”
The actress does very much look like a take-no-nonsense badass in the first trailer for the show that came out this week. Despite it featuring a lot more French accents than we’re used to from a Sherman-Palladino creation, we do get that lushness of visual detail, the irreverent fast-paced dialogue and many locales that were such a big part of “Maisel,” from New York to Paris, where the Weissmans spent a season. I for one am very excited to go on this new (but somewhat familiar) dance with the Sherman-Palladinos.
“Étoile” premiers on Prime Video on April 24.
