How Prime Video ballet drama Étoile keeps it real by mixing ballerinas and dancing actors

Ballet is beautiful. Ballet is ethereal. Ballet is mysterious. Can ballet also be cool? The creators of the new Amazon Prime Video show Étoile – Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel fame – are betting yes. The show is split between New York and Paris as it tracks the story of two ballet companies joining forces to attract audiences and stay afloat. And “afloat” is a good word to describe the chief appeal of the show: real lifts, not to mention turns and leaps, by real ballet dancers, many of whom are in the cast. Sharp-eyed viewers might notice several New York City Ballet stars in supporting roles. A mixture of the Palladinos’ series Bunheads, Emily in Paris – with way more leg warmers – and classic ballet film The Turning Point, Étoile lives and dies by the quality of its dancing. And that is because, as actor David Alvarez says, “Ballet is one of those things you can’t fake”. “You can’t just wing it and pretend you can do it,” says Alvarez, who made his name as one of the original dancing Billy Elliots on Broadway, winning a best-actor Tony at age 14, and playing Bernardo in Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. “Any dancer will be able to spot from a mile away that you’re not actually a ballet dancer, just by how you walk or your posture,” he says. Alvarez plays Gael, a dancer who has a stormy relationship with Cheyenne (Lou de Laâge), herself a stormy prima ballerina, or étoile (star), who comes to New York as part of an elaborate talent swap between the two companies. The gimmick has made uneasy partners of Jack McMillan (Luke Kirby), who runs the Metropolitan Ballet Theatre in New York, and Geneviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who runs the top company in Paris. The two troupes are thinly veiled versions of the New York City Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet. Alvarez is an actor who also dances. Taïs Vinolo, who plays young dancer Mishi, is a real-life ballet dancer making her acting debut. “We express with our body. Expressing with another form, like speaking and acting, was a bit of a challenge,” she says. Vinolo feels confident that the creators found the truth in ballet. “People don’t have a good idea of what ballet is and how hard it is,” she says. “They see the pink tutu and the pointe shoes. But they don’t see that it’s very physical. And it’s hard. It’s a lot of discipline, and it’s also very hard mentally.” The physical challenge of ballet was just what Sherman-Palladino was looking to get across. The producer trained seriously in ballet from the age of four, before fate guided her into a writing career. “And she has the back surgeries to prove it,” quips husband Dan. “It’s an amazing world,” says Sherman-Palladino. “They’re amazing artists. And it’s literally an art form where you’re guaranteed not to make any money. So you have to truly just love it. “You know, they’re trained athletes,” Sherman-Palladino adds. “They’re unbelievably strong, and the things that they can do with their bodies is ridiculous.” She sees dance as like “silent films almost – it’s storytelling, it’s acting, it’s emotion and heartache and happiness and love … I think that so many people who think that dance is not for them just haven’t seen it”. Some of the French cast members barely spoke English, and vice versa. The show takes place in two languages – but the signature rat-a-tat Palladino banter can be hard to translate. “It was tricky because we are very precise with our language, but our language doesn’t exactly translate to French,” Sherman-Palladino says. “Finding a translator may have been the hardest thing that we had to deal with on the entire show – the right translator that caught the essence of our script. So we kept changing translators until we finally found one that everybody could agree on.” For Lou de Laâge, who plays Cheyenne, it was especially challenging because she spoke little English when she was cast. But the Hollywood writers’ strike meant she had nine months to prepare, rather than three, which proved a huge help. Gainsbourg, a British-French actress and singer-songwriter, spoke English but still found it tricky to get into the Palladino rhythm. “I was very nervous about learning the lines,” she says. “I’m very slow. That was already challenging. Then the rhythm was something completely new … in the end, I got to understand the humour and the pace, [but] it took me a little while.” Kirby, whose Jack runs Metropolitan Ballet Theatre, says he knew little about ballet beforehand – but had a cousin who was a dancer, “and so I’d see her putting her body through torment”. Gainsbourg spent a year studying ballet when she was four. She stopped but did piano in the same building – the Salle Pleyel in Paris – and remembers the lift stopping on the ballet floor, where she would go into the dressing room and pick up “a very good, talcum powder smell. And that’s my emotional remembrance of ballet”. As for De Laâge, her mother enrolled her in intensive dance training as a child, but it was a mother’s dream and not the daughter’s. “So that became a fight between us because she wanted that for me, and I didn’t want that for me,” De Laâge says. “[As an actress] I worked with really good dancers, but that wasn’t my passion. I love watching dance.” What Gainsbourg has taken away from doing a series on ballet is “the fact that it’s so extreme and that everybody is working there for their passion. It’s not about money … it’s really about the art, and they’re all completely passionate.” Ask the real ballerinas in the cast – for example, New York City Ballet stars Tiler Peck and Unity Phelan, who play small roles, as does former principal Robbie Fairchild – and they will tell you: ballerinas sew their own ribbons on their pointe shoes. Nobody does it for them. So Vinolo had to demur when, on the series, the crew offered to sew the ribbons on for her. “I have a very specific way,” she explains. “And I don’t like when people touch my pointe shoes. I like to stitch the edge of my pointe shoes to make the platform bigger.” “I do that too!” replies Alvarez, and the two laugh. “Good for balancing.” “Yeah exactly,” Vinolo giggles. “You understand.”

How Prime Video ballet drama Étoile keeps it real by mixing ballerinas and dancing actors

Amazon Prime series Étoile, which follows two ballet companies from New York and Paris, shows the athleticism and dedication of ballerinas