My school heartthrob is now a raging TV star
When Emily in Paris came out in October, it took me a couple of weeks to dive in. I’m French. Do you have any idea how exhausting that is? Whenever French culture gets discussed on the global stage, an abundance of takes ensues, and things get unmanageable faster than you can say “French people don’t actually wear berets”.
With Emily in Paris, some people complained that the show wasn’t realistic – as if Darren Star, its creator, was a storied documentarian instead of the man who gave us Sex and the City and Beverly Hills, 90210. Some Americans cringed at Emily’s behaviour, while some French people cringed at the depiction of their country. Some found the series boring, or confusing, or both. The oufits were bad, we were told. Emily in Paris was bad. It was 2020, and things were bad, bad, bad. I wasn’t going to bother watching the show. Life’s too short! There are old ER episodes waiting to be watched for the 25th time! Then, I happened upon a full cast listing, and everything changed. There, alongside Lily Collins and Philippine Leroy-beaulieu, was a name I hadn’t thought of in years, but recognised instantly: Lucas Bravo. The name transported me back to a time of heavy backpacks, surprise quizzes, and cafeteria lunches. Secret crushes, playground gossip, dreadful PE classes. To most, Lucas Bravo is the handsome actor who plays Gabriel, Emily’s neighbour and love interest in Paris. To me, he’s my former high school hearthrob. He’s the person everyone within a 10-mile radius had a crush on. The one whose name was universally and tacitly acknowledged as the gold standard for charm.
And now the world has noticed. In fact, People Magazine has just crowned my high school heartthrob one of the world’s sexiest men alive — third sexiest to be exact, behind Michael B Jordan and Chris Evans. It’s a funny feeling, having your teenage crush acknowledged around the world. I guess what I’m trying to say is: Welcome to the club, world. We knew you’d catch up eventually.
Bravo and I both happened to atend the Lycée Louis Pasteur, in the small, upscale suburb of Neuilly-sur-seine, about 15 years ago. He’s three years older than me, so we didn’t share the same social circle. (Yes, this was the only reason, and it had nothing to do with the fact that I was a nerd and he was, well, a guy destined to one day be designated third sexiest man alive.) But I knew who he was. Everyone knew. You won’t have read this in many English-language profiles of Bravo, but he’s the son of a rather well-known former soccer player, Daniel Bravo. By the time I atended the same school as his son, the elder Bravo had long retired and become a commentator for sports TV channels, a job he still has now. Lucas’s mother, Eva Bravo, is a singer and an animal rights activist.
But let me tell you a bit more about Neuillysur-seine, the aforementioned Paris suburb where Lucas Bravo and I both lived for a few years. It’s regularly ranked as one of the wealthiest suburbs in France. In fact, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was its mayor from 1983 to 2002. That tells you everything you need to know. Neuilly-sur-seine, usually shortened to just Neuilly, is a place French people are familiar with. It’s also a place French people tend to have a lot of opinions about.
One of the most striking things about Neuilly is its Montague-vs-capulet divide between “old money” and “new money”. “Old money” in this context refers to literal aristocratic families who descend from royalty. “New money” refers to anyone who accrued their wealth over the past three generations. Being “new money” means, for example, that you might end up renting an apartment from your aristocratic neighbors who inherited the property from their ancestors and have absolutely no idea how to manage it. It means passing a few unofficial tests, such as wearing the right clothes and the right kind of watch. It means going through life, basically, as the Unsinkable Molly Brown, who survived the sinking of the Titanic and is portrayed by Kathy Bates in the movie.
briefcase-toting (yes, really) boys at school.