‘Étoile’ is creator Amy Sherman-Palladino’s love letter to alternate career path

Amy Sherman-Palladino could have been a professional dancer.

Early in her career, the Gilmore Girls creator faced a fork in the road — take a writing gig on Roseanne or attend a callback for Cats. Sherman-Palladino chose network television and has gone on to become one of the most beloved voices in the business alongside her husband, Dan Palladino.

With The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the Palladinos paid tribute to stand-up comedy and the world of 1960s comedy that had been the milieu of her father. Now, their new series for Prime Video, Étoile, turns its eye to Sherman-Palladino’s alternate career path — and the world that mesmerized her mother.

“My mom was a Broadway dancer, so it’s not exactly what her life was,” explains Sherman-Palladino. “But she definitely was the dance force in the family. And she’s the one that stuck my ass in ballet class at four years old and kept it there.”

Étoile, which drops its entire first season on Prime Video on April 24, follows two professional ballet companies, New York’s Metropolitan Ballet and Paris’s Ballet de l’Opéra National. As both companies face the realities of contemporary arts funding, their directors, Jack (Luke Kirby) and Geneviève (Charlotte Gainsbourg) agree to swap dancers, creating a marketing gimmick and injecting fresh blood into their ensembles.

For Sherman-Palladino, this narrative was also a chance to explore the road not taken. “If you love dance, you never lose that feeling,” she explains. “You just miss it forever. At least I did. So, this is a way for me to watch other people do it, who are still in shape and aren’t going to go directly to a hospital after they take a bow. It was a way to feed off that creativity and energy and eat a sandwich.”

Funnily enough, that admiring talent from afar is also what Kirby and Gainsbourg say drive their characters and their hunger for greatness. “We have that simpatico because we both have this shared affection for something,” Kirby says of the characters. “We’re willing to do anything to try and keep it alive and thriving.”

“But I also think we maybe have something in common where there’s an envy that Jack feels about these artists and what it is to have innate talent,” he continues. “We’re people who are adjacent to that and our affection is real. But there’s also an appetite of, ‘Oh, I wish I knew what that felt like.'”

For Gainsbourg, it was less about envying talent and more about bestowing an understanding of a dancer’s shelf life in Geneviève. “I don’t think she sees herself incapable of the genius,” she says. “She sees it in other people, but I don’t think there’s the frustration of not being a real artist. I wanted my character to be an ex-dancer, to have the sadness of aging. [Ballet] is for the young.”

Étoile is a unique undertaking of a show. Set equally in Paris and New York, it’s fully bilingual, switching constantly between French and English. It’s also a study of ballet in the old world versus the new.

“Paris Ballet is one of the oldest ballet companies,” says Sherman-Palladino. “It goes back to the courts of the kings. American ballet is more of the young upstart, if you will. Ballet is much more of a tradition in Europe. In America, not so much.”

“There’s also very similar problems,” she continues. “COVID-19 took a hit on all the arts, but it wiped out a generation of potential dancers and dancers who maybe had a couple more years left before they retired. It just took without giving back. You don’t recover from something like that so easily. Both companies are dealing with that.”

However, showing that required rounding up a company of actors and dancers who could believably do both. Étoile doesn’t shy away from showing the dancers dancing. In fact, there are a few episodes where more than half the running time is dedicated to depicting a ballet performance.

For Sherman-Palladino, that was the key to getting audiences invested. “It’s a whole show about dancers talking about dancing, so you’ve got to show the dancing,” she says. “You’ve got to show what everybody’s up in a frenzy about. You’ve got to see what’s on the line. This is about dancers who are dealing with their balletic mortality. You twist the knee wrong once, and that could be curtains, literally, on your career.”

“Jack and Genevieve [are] dealing with, how do they keep their companies afloat?” she continues. “We can’t just say it must survive without showing people what everyone’s fighting for.”

A noble aim, but one that required extensive training and adjustment on both sides. Lou de Laâge is a French actress starring as prima ballerina Cheyenne Toussaint. An actress by trade, she had a body double, but she also studied ballet for nine months prior to filming, brushing up on technique she learned when she was younger.

Meanwhile, Taïs Vinolo, who plays French ballerina Mishi Duplessis, is a dancer first and actress second, having previously worked exclusively as a ballet dancer. “Doing ballet on a TV show is so much different from performing and being on stage,” she notes. “On stage, you get to do it once and if you fail, you fail. And on the show you have the opportunity to do it over and over. But not only the opportunity, you have to do it over and over. So, it’s challenging to preserve your body and find a way not to get injured and not to tire yourself too much, while also being able to give as much as possible in a performance.”

For those who are primarily actors, the greatest challenge was folding their identity and physicality as a dancer into every aspect of their character. Ivan du Pontavice, who portrays arrogant French dancer Gabin, turned to choreographer and producer Marguerite Derricks for help refining that consistency between performance modes.

“Building him from a point of view of the dancer as well as the character made those scenes where you have to do both at the same time a little bit more accessible,” he explains. “Because otherwise it would’ve felt very alien. The Palladinos are experts on what they are expecting from you to deliver as a dancer, not just as an actor. Having these people around, really knowing what they were doing and guiding you, you could just let go and trust them to know what they were on about. Then it’s your job as an actor to be believable as much as in the dancing as in the acting.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

It’s a notable shift for the Palladinos, known for their punchy, head-spinningly fast dialogue and wordy scripts. “We used dance for story,” says Sherman-Palladino. “We’re showing what is at stake. It’s story as well as beautiful production numbers.”

To that end, they recruited renowned contemporary ballet choreographer Christopher Wheeldon to choreograph several of the show’s dance sequences. “He choreographs the way I feel our dialogue flows,” she adds. “It’s seamless and it keeps going.”

Perhaps Dan Palladino sums up the new approach best: “We decided not to have people talk for a while, and instead, talk with their bodies.”

Étoile premiers April 24 on Prime Video.