Yanic Truesdale’s characters in Étoile and Gilmore Girls are both French, but the comparisons stop there.
“He’s the deputy director of the Paris Opera, so he is more on the finance side of things,” Yanic, 55, exclusively tells Life & Style of Raphaël Marchand, his character in Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino’s new ballet drama, Étoile.
According to the Canadian American actor, Raphaël is quite different from Michel Gerard, the grumpy, sarcastic yet beloved inn concierge whom Yanic portrayed in seven seasons of Gilmore Girls from 2000 to 2007, plus the 2016 Netflix revival, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.
“Compared to Michel … Michel was kind of a passive aggressive, miserable at his job type of thing, as opposed to Raphaël, [who] is a very straight shooter, completely immersed with his job, lives for his job, and committed to his job 24/7, 24/7 type of personality,” Yanic explains. “So very, very different. Yet they merge in the fact that they’re both French.”
However, fans who tune into Étoile should not expect to hear Michel’s French accent in Raphaël’s voice.
“When Amy called me, I said, ‘Amy, I am not doing a French accent.’ She’s like, ‘OK, it’s fine.’ I said, ‘OK, we have a deal,’” Yanic says. “But I just didn’t want fans to be confused, and the audience to be confused that this was Michel. And Michel had such a specific accent that I didn’t want to be trapped in that. So, that’s another big difference.”
He continues, “I didn’t feel too concerned that for [Raphaël], as a French person, this is such a high-profile job that usually those people have worked all over the world, so they tend to lose whatever accent they have and take other accents depending on where they were based and whatever other jobs they’ve had. So it kind of made sense for me that that would be the case with him as well.”
Étoile, set in both New York and Paris, follows the “dancers and artistic staff of two world-renowned ballet companies [as they] embark on an ambitious gambit to save their storied institutions by swapping their most talented stars,” according to the show’s synopsis.
Yanic teases that the world of dance was “very engaging and beautifully shot,” noting that viewers who are familiar with that world will “get a lot for their money,” while those who aren’t will “be introduced in a really beautiful, approachable way.”
“And so, I think it’s kind of like a win-win,” he says. “They did really well on that front. So, I’m excited for people to see it, for that.”
Yanic adds that he hopes “people will be excited about this show as much as we loved making it. It was truly a joy, and the cast is just fantastic. I have never made so many friends in one job. And that’s truly a fact. So yeah, hopefully people will embrace the world of dance, which is a world I’ve always admired and been intrigued by.”
Describing the show in three words, Yanic says, “Exciting, compelling and unique.”
“I have to say, it doesn’t look like anything else I’ve seen on TV,” he concludes.
All eight episodes of Étoile are now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
