In Étoile, Luke Kirby and Charlotte Gainsbourg Battle to Save Ballet

It’s been more than a decade since Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino’s short-lived ABC Family show Bunheads, starring Sutton Foster as a has-been Vegas showgirl turned small-town ballet teacher, was axed after a single season. The creators themselves say that their 13-year grudge over that 2012 cancellation helped inspire Étoile—a new Prime Video series about dance written, directed, and executive produced by the real-life couple behind Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

“Look, my parents taught me very early to never let things go, and I am my parents’ child,” Sherman-Palladino tells Vanity Fair. “Bunheads gave us a little taste of the fun of being in that world on a smaller scale. 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.”

Set in both New York City and Paris, Étoile (that’s French for “star,” Américains) follows the dancers and artistic staff of two world-renowned ballet companies as they embark on a groundbreaking scheme to lure audiences back to their art form. “A lot of our dancers have abandoned toe shoes for TikToks,” says Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Geneviève, interim general director of l’Opera Francais and Le Ballet National. “The dressing rooms are filled with screaming babies and asshole rescue dogs.”

Her words reflect Sherman-Palladino’s own perspective. “You almost lost a generation of dancers in COVID, because you have to keep the training going,” she explains. “A kid starts training at five, they missed years six, seven, and eight—that’s kind of it. Or dancers who were in their prime, and by the time COVID or strikes are over, now they’re looking at, ‘Well, shit, what’s next for me?’ That’s a huge loss to the arts. We don’t know what would’ve [or] could’ve been.”

Geneviève proposes a fix to Luke Kirby’s Jack, executive director of the Metropolitan Ballet Theater at New York City’s Lincoln Center: a one-year swap of their top talent, complete with tandem seasons and a splashy transatlantic marketing campaign. A similar exchange of dancers between Paris and New York City actually happened back in 2009. But when asked about it, the Palladinos say they were unaware of any real-life basis for the series. Instead, the eight-episode Étoile, which premieres on April 24, was partially inspired by Frederick Wiseman documentaries like La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, which capture “the tough world behind this very delicate art form,” says Palladino.

Ballet is still endangered, thanks to budget cuts and a lengthy post-pandemic rebuilding process. These are “external forces pounding back an art form that is always trying to survive anyhow,” says Sherman-Palladino, “where you’re almost guaranteed to never get rich, and you have to truly love it.” Only a handful of ballerinas have transcended the medium: “There’s [Mikhail] Baryshnikov, there’s Misty Copeland, and you’re out,” she continues. “These are people whose careers are short and their commitment is 100%. It’s every single day from the time they were young children. One injury can knock you out. It’s a scary world.”

Adds Palladino, “We have literally heard 29-year-old amazing dancers talk about how old they are, like they’re turning 76.”

Sherman-Palladino herself quit dancing for a good reason: “I stopped dancing the minute I realized somebody was going to actually pay me to do something, and I could have a sandwich,” she says. Nevertheless, “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.”

Toward the end of The Marvelous Maisel’s Emmy-winning five-season run, the Palladinos realized they needn’t look far for their next leading man. “They beckoned me to a free meal, which is hard to pass up. We had just finished on Maisel and were saying our farewells, and it was very sad,” says Kirby, who won an Emmy in 2019 for playing Maisel’s soulfully wounded Lenny Bruce. “Then at dinner, they started to tell me about this new thing they were working on. I was entranced by the notion of doing something around dance, because I have a secret affection for it. And any excuse to get to stay with them sounded good to me.”

The affection is very mutual. “Luke Kirby is never going to leave our world. He has no choice in the matter,” says Sherman-Palladino. “Even if there’s no show, he has to come over to the house and just sit here.”

The Palladinos were far more surprised by the eventual casting of Gainsbourg, who replaced Call My Agent! star Camille Cottin amid scheduling conflicts. “She’s just annoyingly cool,” Sherman-Palladino says of the actor, daughter of late French musician Serge Gainsbourg and actor turned fashion icon Jane Birkin. “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.’”

Best known for her work in provocative Lars von Trier films like Melancholia and Nymphomaniac, Gainsbourg reveled in the chance to play a character who made her laugh. “She’s extreme in a way that I find very amusing to play,” she tells VF. “And I love the dynamic between Amy and Dan. It’s always charming to see a couple, and they’re not shy about it, so it’s fun to imagine the way they write. The writing sounds like them…. 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.”

Given their respective headquarters in New York and Paris, Jack and Geneviève’s storylines are largely sequestered from one another. But a previous romantic entanglement has complicated their working relationship. “I don’t know for how long they were lovers, but it gives [Geneviève] a real animosity against him, and at the same time, a real friendship,” says Gainsbourg. “At one point I really need him, at another I’m totally against him. Then he will deceive me in another way…maybe later on.”

Despite the distance, Jack and Geneviève are bound by their passion for creating the best art possible. “They say that our psyches are developed in the glimmer of our mother’s eyes,” says Kirby, “and I do think they both hold their responsibility with these companies from an almost parental vantage.”

Tucked within the workplace family are a mix of faces both fresh and familiar to the Palladino universe. Gilmore Girls alums Kelly Bishop and Yanic Truesdale appear alongside Maisel’s Gideon Glick as Tobias Bell, a rising star choreographer whose quirky theatrics don’t easily translate to French sensibilities. The American half of the show is livened up by star ballerina Cheyenne (played by two-time César nominee Lou de Laâge), a brash, très, très French performer.

When Jack asks if she enjoys dancing, Cheyenne indignantly replies: “No. But it is who I am, so there is no choice.” In addition to her amusing soft spot for the oft-dismissed Nutcracker, Cheyenne also has a keen eye for talent, plucking her dance partner Gael Rodriguez (West Side Story’s David Alvarez) from a self-imposed sabbatical. “Dance is one thing I do, it’s not my life,” Gael tells Cheyenne, sparks flying in spite of their opposing styles.

Gainsbourg and Kirby’s characters remain behind the curtain. “I wanted my character to have a dancer’s background, but they didn’t imagine that,” says Gainsbourg, who instead prepared for her role by meeting with actual opera and ballet managers in Paris. One of her biggest takeaways was the modest size of their offices: “I mean, in the series, it’s nicer, let’s say.”

Kirby has fond memories of sneaking onto the balcony of his Montreal theater school to watch the dancers, “being just so enchanted by their dedication and the abstract stories that come out of human bodies in motion.” The summer before filming Étoile, he took some ballet classes “to better understand the language and throw my own body into the ring.” So Kirby was disappointed to learn his character wouldn’t dance onscreen. “I’m still coming to terms with it, and hope we’ll find a way for me to strap on my red shoes. Because I think these legs are worthy,” says Kirby, a hint of mischief to his voice. Is there a chance he’ll dance in the show’s second season, which has already been ordered by Prime Video? “Maybe just with the eyes, I don’t know,” he replies.

Netflix’s Emily in Paris is a punchline in an early episode of Étoile—and an example of the “picture postcard” portrayal of Paris that the Palladinos wanted to avoid. While there are “really, really beautiful things in that show,” Palladino says that they “specifically wanted to show a different side of Paris,” beyond frequent shots of the Eiffel Tower.

But there was a steep learning curve for the Palladinos, who admit that their French wasn’t exactly à la hauteur. “A lot of our crew spoke both French and English, so that was helpful to the two idiots who have every Duolingo app on their phone and never turn them on,” says Sherman-Palladino. While working with strictly French-speaking actors, the creators relied on their more bilingual costars, as well as translator Dany Héricourt, whose past credits include the Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall.

With the aid of their go-to choreographer Marguerite Derricks, whose history with the Palladinos dates back to Bunheads, the creators built stables of dancers on both coasts, insisting that every extra in any ballet studio scenes had to be an actual ballerina. “Dancers put their shoes on differently, walk differently, sit differently,” says Sherman-Palladino. “You don’t have to know anything about dance and you can look at somebody putting on their shoes be like, ‘That person’s not a dancer.’” Scenes involving actual choreography had to be filmed at an ultra-efficient pace to accommodate a dancer’s “shelf life,” adds Palladino. “You can’t do it 40 thousand times. The body simply doesn’t work that way.”

Adding to the degree of difficulty is that, unlike dance in New York City, Sherman-Palladino says that ballet in Paris is a government-sponsored art form with a whole lot of bureaucracy surrounding it. While a New York City shooting location could be lost and replaced by another the next day, “in Paris, they’ve got to talk to your mother and four people who like you, and get a blood sample,” she jokes. “It’s a big process.”

Having recently worked on the 2024 Broadway revival of Once Upon a Mattress, Sherman-Palladino was familiar with the stage world in New York. Still, she relied on performers like Tiler Peck, Unity Phelan, and Robbie Fairchild to help broker goodwill about the project in the dance community. “There are so many dark, dark depictions of the dance world, leaning into anorexia and suicide and all that stuff. They were very wary of a big project coming out of Amazon,” says Palladino. “I think that the ballet world has been burned a lot by people coming in and depicting it in such dark terms. It doesn’t necessarily promote performance. It doesn’t promote ticket sales.”

Adds Sherman-Palladino, “And it’s not the whole story. They needed to know they weren’t being used as window dressing—that their voice and stories were important.”

The Palladinos’ love for dance is evident in the series, which ends each episode with rehearsal footage of actual ballerinas. After strikes in Hollywood halted initial production on Étoile, its central theme of keeping an art form alive as the world around it changes resonated in an entirely new way. “Can you wait five minutes while we both sob?” Palladino asks when reminded of the parallels. “Say, ‘The Palladinos took five minutes to gently weep.’”

Once composed, Sherman-Palladino takes a moment to wax poetic about the survival of their lifeblood. “It’s very hard to watch things like this suffer because, quite frankly, art can save people’s lives,” she says. “It can change thought process. It can make things [that are] intolerable in the world tolerable….A lot of times, it’s the reason to get up in the morning….You need art, literature, drama, dance. Without this, life is just not life.”