‘Emily in Paris’ Casting Director on Finding Sylvie, Camille Razat Exit

“We’ve created a monster!” quips casting director Juliette Ménager about the “Emily in Paris” frenzy. Ménager, who describes herself as a gourmet French chef known for mastering the secret sauce that American showrunners are lining up for, has been part of Darren Star‘s romantic comedy series from the beginning.

She’s contributed significantly to its success with her clever casting hunches, such as Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, who plays chic and fierce boss Sylvie Grateau. The 62-year-old Leroy-Beaulieu, a fan favorite with over four decades of credits, filled a role initially written for a 35 to 40-year-old actress. Or Marcello, Emily’s Italian beau, who needed a different look than the typical Italian hunk. But the Netflix show, the fifth season of which is currently filming, is only one of many hits on her long resumé.

Over her 30-plus year career, she’s worked on music videos by Daft Punk and Mylene Farmer, award-winning movies such as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Babel,” Oliver Stone’s “Alexander,” Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” and Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods,” and a string of high-profile series with American and/or British talent, including “Marie-Antoinette,” “Franklin,” “The Walking Dead,” “The New Look” and “Etoile.” “Emily in Paris” also reunited Ménager with Star two decades after casting for Season 6 of “Sex and the City,” which shot partly in Paris.

The well-connected Ménager accompanied Luca Guadagnino to last year’s Marrakech Film Festival, where he presided over the jury. When he presented Ménager with the Artios Award for Excellence in Casting in February, Guadagnino said that he was “fan of [hers] already before meeting with her.”

Known for her Parisian flair, sense of humor and creative inspiration, Ménager has become the go-to casting director for big international projects filming in France, charming showrunners and filmmakers while working with actors to close the gap on occasional language barriers and different acting traditions. It’s no simple feat in a country like France, where very few actors are fluent in English and even fewer have demo reels.

In spite of those challenges, Ménager and Raphael Benoliel, the show’s executive producer (“Mission: Impossible – Fallout”), and Anne Siebel, the production designer (“Midnight in Paris”) managed to entice Star and his team to shoot the whole series in Paris rather than just a few days as had been initially planned when they started scouting in the city. “They were just going to do the exteriors in Paris, but they fell in love with everything here,” says Ménager, sitting in the colorful living room of her apartment in the hip ninth arrondissement of Paris which is tastefully decorated with touches of African art and 1960s design pieces.

Often resorting to culinary metaphors as she talks passionately about her work, Ménager says she feels “like a chef who knows how to curate the very best ingredients from the best places — and in my case it’s often the agents I collaborate with, and also casting agents in other countries.”

Pointing out that “casting actually means fishing in English,” Ménager, who founded Studio Casting in Paris in 1994 and co-created the International Casting Directors Association 25 years ago, says she’s often going for actors who are under the radar. “Outside of Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Isabelle Adjani and maybe Marion Cotillard, Americans don’t really know French actors so what matters is to find the ones who really match the characters,” she says.

For Ménager, there’s no small role. “It’s like you’re cooking a beautiful meal: if one tomato isn’t good, it’s going to ruin the whole dish. Same thing on a movie or series if an actor who has one scene screws up,” she says.

Raised by her father, a war journalist, and a mother who was an interior designer, Ménager says she owes them her inquisitive mind and skills for curating and visualizing things.

She says she also knows to put herself in the shoes of an American, Italian or Spanish filmmaker.

“I know what makes them laugh, what seduces them, and it’s very different from one country to another,” she says. In the case of “Emily in Paris,” she’s been able to put herself in the shoes of Star, whom she says is “extremely involved in casting along with his team of directors and writers.”

Her biggest coup on “Emily in Paris” was bringing in Leroy-Beaulieu, who was far from unknown in France since breaking through in “Three Men and a Cradle” in 1985. More recently, she had a small role in “Call My Agent!”

“I read the character description and I could totally imagine this Sylvie Grateau working at an agency. I’ve seen a lot of them,” says Ménager. “I immediately pictured Philippine, who I had known for ages and she was the character. She had that star quality, she was very sophisticated, very Parisian and with an incredible talent for dark comedy. She has timing.”

“Most importantly, she made Darren Star laugh from the first glimpse at her self tape,” Ménager continues. “It was genius of him to choose her for the role, even though Sylvie Grateau was supposed to be much younger.”

That kind of surprise is what Ménager enjoys the most. “I love working with showrunners because they’re creating the characters, and it’s fascinating to be part of that creative process and I’ve been blessed that Darren has trusted my instincts,” she says.

For the fifth season, Ménager also brought in Michelle Laroque, a long-time comedy actress who will play Sylvie’s friend.

“I saw that Sylvie was going to meet an old friend of hers in Season 5, and it’s complicated because actresses of that generation tend to have a certain look and it was difficult to find someone available who could work well with Philippine,” she says. “But suddenly I thought of Michelle, who speaks English fluently and is such a good actress — she’s got that perfect comedic timing. Then I had to sell the idea to Darren and the rest of the team who didn’t know her and they loved her right away, like Philippine.”

“I was just on set today and everyone was impressed with her comedic talent. She’s like a Stradivarius. She gives you 20 versions of hello,” Ménager adds.

The same goes for with Eugenio Franceschini, who plays Marcello in “Emily in Paris” and returns in an expanded role in Season 5 as Emily’s love interest.

“At first I said ‘Oh my God, it’s mission impossible, I have to find that Italian man in his 30s and because we have Lucas Bravo and Lucien Laviscount who are very classically handsome, I didn’t want to have an Italian actor who looked like a Dolce & Gabbana model,” says Ménager.

Because she knew that “it was going to be a romantic story with Emily,” she had to find someone who had a soft look. That’s when Franceschini came into the picture and did a chemistry read with Collins in the flesh in Paris.

“Eugenio has a lot of charm and he’s a good actor, which is essential because on a TV show like ‘Emily in Paris’ everything moves quickly so you need actors who are top notch,” she says, adding that “it’s about the personality, about the talent and about luck. It’s timing. It’s like love.”

She also enlisted Bravo, whom she met years ago as a young model who aspired to become an actor. “He was the last person we auditioned for the role of Gabriel,” she said. His career has taken off in a major way since breaking out in the show, and he’s starred in a number of movies such as “Ticket to Paradise” opposite George Clooney and Julia Roberts. He’s been critical of the evolution of his character in “Emily in Paris,” saying in interviews that he had “slowly turned into guacamole.”

While Bravo will be back in Season 5 despite his criticism, Camille Razat, a former model who played Emily’s rival and Gabriel’s on-and-off French girlfriend for four seasons, announced that she’s done with the show. But Ménager, who also takes pride in finding her for the part, plays down her decision.

“She wanted to take a little break. But she could maybe come back,” says Ménager. “As Darren told me, from his experience on long-running shows like ‘Beverly Hills 90210,’ ‘Melrose Place’ or ‘Sex and the City,’ the cast becomes a family, and it’s like with your family, sometimes you need a little breather and then you come back.”

Not all French actors are keen to star in “Emily in Paris,” however. Ménager reveals that some established French actors tend to be “prudish” when it comes to starring in the series because “they love to hate it.”

“When I did the casting for the first season it was easier because it was new, it was fresh, and I could promote the fact that it was from Darren Star, the creator of ‘Sex and the City.’ But recently, I had to find a French actor to join the series and I got turned down everywhere in Paris!” she says, adding that she ended up finding a “very sexy, handsome French actor.”

Other French actors, like the quirky Bruno Gouery, are extremely grateful to the show, which led to roles in “The White Lotus” and Johnny Depp’s “Modi.” “Before starring in ‘Emily in Paris,’ he was on [cable channel] Canal Comédie and he was writing sketches, but he didn’t act very much,” she says. “Now he’s a star and he tells me he’s getting hit on by women like never before!”

Ménager is at a point in her career where she’s almost exclusively working mostly with American directors and showrunners, a niche that’s a “non-stop job,” she says.

The business of casting has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, especially with the prevalence of self-tapes which she says makes the process “very democratic” by allowing more people to audition and therefore brings an “artistic profusion.” But while “budgets and shooting times are not what they used to be, expectations are still the same,” she says. On the upside, her line of work — long considered secondary — is now being acknowledged at the most prestigious award shows. In addition to the Oscars, which will will introduce a best casting category in 2026, the Berlin Film Festival will hand out a Silver Bear for casting starting next year.

Although she barely works on French productions anymore, she recently collaborated with Jean-Francois Richet on Netflix’s next big French movie, “Quasimodo,” which will star Vincent Cassel as the character created by Victor Hugo in his cult 1831 novel “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.”

“It’s funny, Jean-François wanted to work with me because I’ve lot of period projects like ‘Versailles,” “Marie-Antoinette’ and ‘Franklin,” she says. “He needed very strong and well trained actors because it’s going to be such a big film, with so much preparation, costume and makeup; and we got along very well because I understood what he needed to create a real spectacle — that’s what I always look for in films and series,” she says.