[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for Étoile.]From Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, the Amazon MGM Studios series Étoile is set in the world of professional ballet and follows the talented and temperamental dancers and artistic staff of two companies. Jack McMillan (Luke Kirby), the director of the New York City Metropolitan Ballet Theater, and Geneviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the director of Le Ballet National in Paris, agree to swap Mishi Duplessis (Taïs Vinolo), who ended up in New York City after being cut, for Paris’ primary ballerina Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge) in an attempt to light a new spark with both funding and the audience that attends their performances. But past history and new drama create questions about whether they’ll really be able to pull all of this off.
During this interview with Collider, Sherman-Palladino and Palladino discussed returning to the world of dance with Étoile, the devotion dancers have to the art form, that angry ballerina dance accompanied by a Tom Waits song, balancing the drama with the performances, how Lou de Laâge surpassed the challenge the series set for her, how they so often end up working with some of the same actors in various projects, the luck of Kelly Bishop, that shared kiss, and whether there could be any more Gilmore Girls episodes.
Collider: As somebody started taking dance class at four years old, I’m obsessed with this series. I am totally the audience for this as I was the audience for Bunheads, and I will be forever heartbroken over the far-too-soon ending of that series.
DAN PALLADINO: You?!
Creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino Explore a New Spin on Familiar Territory With ‘Étoile’

“We wanted to get back into the world of dance.”

I’m curious, what made you decide to revisit the world of ballet? Was it a situation where, if you couldn’t do it with another season of Bunheads, you’d find a way to do it, one way or another?
AMY SHERMAN-PALLADINO: A little bit. Bunheads was such a great experience and we wanted to get back into the world of dance, but it was also an opportunity to delve into an adult professional ballet company and really show a side of ballet that isn’t always represented. A lot of ballet in movies and television is super dark. And the darkness is there. There’s darkness in every profession. I’m sure there are some steel workers that push each other off of buildings too. But we wanted to show the other side. We wanted to show the athleticism and the devotion to an art form that is going to pay them nothing, ever, and their race against the clock to try to achieve everything that they can achieve before their bodies give out on them. And yet, the camaraderie and the loves and the hates and the fights, and all the fun things that happen when you lock a bunch of creative people in a room together for many, many, many hours, was the side we wanted to be able to jump into.

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My favorite moment in the whole season is the dance that Cheyenne does to “Big in Japan” by Tom Waits. How did that come about?
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: Originally in the pilot, there was a different dance number that Cheyenne did, and I just didn’t love it. It just wasn’t as good as all our other dancing. Just dramatically, it was in a weird place, and we set it someplace that it didn’t really work. Everything about it was just off. Not so off that it would have been like, “That’s terrible, turn it off.” But just off enough. Everything else was so good that it just felt like we could do better. And we were deep into our process because we’d been shooting in Paris and shooting in New York and shooting in Paris. It was the first time I’d seen the pilot put all together. We were in Paris and fiddling around with it. “Big in Japan” is a song that I actually wanted to choreograph a dance to for a really long time. With Bunheads, we choreographed to another Tom Waits song that was beautiful. This one just had the anger in it, the annoyance in it, and the, “I’m this, but I’m not that,” biting bit of sarcasm that felt like it was her. The song just said who she was.
PALLADINO: Ironically, it was the last dance piece that we shot, and it’s one of the first ones that people will see. It’s her angry ballerina dance.
How did you figure out how much of the dance performances or rehearsals of the classes that you wanted to show?
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: They’re pretty long. Our shows are not short. We take our time. There’s a finite amount of airtime. Every time we dance on this show, it has to forward the story. We don’t just stop to do a dance. It has to say something about our character, or about the storyline that’s going on, or you need to understand something by the end of it. If it didn’t serve that purpose, a lot of times we wound up pulling it out because we only had a certain amount of time to get everything. We have a big cast in two countries, so as anything is in a piece, a scene has got to work to push the story along. If you feel like you’re just treading water, it’s got to go. Same thing with dance.
Lou de Laâge Took On a Huge Challenge With ‘Étoile’ and Rose to the Occasion

“She’s a brave, cowardice-free young woman.”

Image via Amazon MGM Studios

How did you end up casting Lou de Laâge in this? It’s her first English-speaking role and she had to learn the language and learn the style of speech that you guys write in, and then also learn the language of ballet.
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: The better question is, why did Lou do this? It seems like a lot of work to put in.
PALLADINO: She’s a brave, cowardice-free young woman. Even days like this, where she’s talking to a lot of press, we say, “Oh, boy, it’s been a long day.” For her, her English is a lot better than she lets on, but if you say, “Shuffle off to Buffalo,” she’s going to have no idea what you’re saying. She doesn’t get idioms like that. She’s a remarkably focused woman who had to take as much ballet class as she could at her age. She has to walk like a dancer and stand like a dancer as much as she could.
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: She had to walk around in toe shoes, which is completely unnatural and very uncomfortable for dancers to do. For somebody who hasn’t walked around in toe shoes and doesn’t spend all day in toe shoes, it’s a completely different sensation.
PALLADINO: Our French casting director sent a dozen really great women reading for this role, and Lou just popped off the screen. And then, we brought her out and auditioned her in person. She was absolutely perfect, composed, beautiful, everything.
We never know which of your former cast members we’ll see again, and we see Luke Kirby, Yanic Truesdale and Kelly Bishop in this. When it comes time to assemble the cast of a TV series, do you start with the actors that you’ve worked with before and see who you can fit in where? How do you make sure that some of them show back up at some point?
PALLADINO: We start with characters first, but we did know that we were writing this lead male role for Luke Kirby. We knew it before he knew it. And then, we told him, “By the way, you have to do this role.”
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: And it’s too late to run because we know where you live.
PALLADINO: When we thought of Jack’s mother, we had Kelly in mind, but we didn’t know if she’d be available. And then, we realized we really needed this role for a right-hand person for Charlotte [Gainsbourg]’s character, and we knew Yanic would be perfect. And then, we had to see whether he was available and could do it. We would never put an actor in just because we like the person and have worked with the person before. We just appreciate the skills of those people that we’ve worked with before. There’s no one like Kelly Bishop. There’s no one who can deliver a line like Kelly Bishop. There’s no one who could flip the page to see who’s dancing with Cheyenne and give that reading of that line. There’s just no one who can do that better than Kelly Bishop, so why not? It’s the fourth thing she’s been in for us.
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: She’s in all of our stuff. She’s been in every single thing we’ve ever done. We’ve got to keep the luck going.

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“Never say never.”

I don’t want to sound ungrateful for the Gilmore Girls revival that we got because I love it and appreciate it deeply. But will we get more, especially now that we’re close to 10 years since that came out?
PALLADINO: We never say never.
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: There are no plans at the moment. But again, we never say never.
Do you ever think about or wonder about any of the characters that you’ve created? Do you try not to think about them after you’ve closed the book on them?
PALLADINO: That might be a level of psychosis that even we haven’t achieved.
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: Because we’ve stayed close with these people, I don’t have to wonder. I don’t have to wonder where Lauren [Graham] is right now because I know where she is.
PALLADINO: But we definitely read things and see things where we think, “Oh, if we could do that at a town meeting in Stars Hollow.”
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: There are stories that occur to us where we’re like, “That would have been great for Midge. That would have been a great joke monologue for Midge to do.”
PALLADINO: The characters are still definitely swimming around in our heads all the time. We have reached that stage of psychosis. They’re often nicer than the people that we deal with in real life and we can control them.
Since you file things away in your minds to possibly pull them out to use them at some point, is that how the line came about, “I heard he has a wife. If he did, he had her Shelly Miscaviged, never to be heard from again”? Is that a line of dialogue you’d been waiting to use somewhere?
PALLADINO: Inadvertently, unconsciously, maybe.
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: That came out and as he was writing.
PALLADINO: We come up with the stories and we put a lot of detail into them. There is even some dialogue. So, when we sit down to actually write the script, it flows pretty quickly. It goes quick. We don’t belabor things. And when you go quick, your brain spits some stuff out that you didn’t know was up there. And then, we type it on a piece of paper. It’s what we’ve been doing for 20-something years.
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: Two hundred years.
‘Étoile’ Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino Explains the Connection Between Tobias and Gabin

“They fill a need in each other.”

Image via Amazon MGM Studios

I really loved the moment with the kiss between the choreographer and the dancer, with Tobias (Gideon Glick) and Gabin (Ivan du Pontavice), after Tobias has his artistic breakdown. Did you want a sweet moment like that to balance everything before that?
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: I think you wanted it for them. They’ve been through a lot, those two. They’ve been up and down. Those are our favorite love relationships to write because it wasn’t about love and it wasn’t about dating, it was about something else. They fill a need in each other and they inspire each other. They see a way, through the other person, to achieve that goal that they want to achieve. At the point that we were, you don’t want to cut them with a joke. You want them to have a real moment of connection because they’ve been moving towards something the entire season.

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Well, I am obsessed and waiting for Season 2.
SHERMAN-PALLADINO: I love it! I love obsession!

Étoile

Release Date

April 24, 2025

Network

Prime Video

Étoile is available to stream on Prime Video. Check out the trailer: