🎧 'Étoile' Star Luke Kirby on His Second Dance with 'Maisel' Creators
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Lenny Bruce to Lincoln Center, the actor goes where the Palladinos lead him. Plus: I talk to Tyler Coates about the Emmy landscape and what could disrupt it
Lenny Bruce to Lincoln Center, the actor goes where the Palladinos lead him. Plus: I talk to Tyler Coates about the Emmy landscape and what could disrupt it
STEPPING UP Working with Dan Palladino and Amy Sherman-Palladino on Étoile, star Luke Kirby tells me, “Every moment has the potential for a little dose of wow.” (Philippe Antonello/Amazon MGM Studios)
Luke Kirbyappeared in 16 episodes across the five-season run of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, playing the legendary comedian Lenny Bruce as he drifted in and out of the life of Rachel Brosnahan’s Midge. Kirby, 46, was an indelible presence on the show and won a guest actor Emmy for it in 2019 — but when the series wrapped in 2023, he still had the feeling that he wanted more, he tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast.
“I felt really good about what we had done with Lenny, but I did feel like I had missed out on a bigger feast of getting to work with them,” Kirby says of Maisel creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino. It was around then that the couple took him to lunch — and served up that bigger feast he was looking for: a new series they were developing set in the world of ballet. As Kirby puts it, “To be invited into a new adventure with them so quickly was just really charmed.”
That new adventure for the Canadian actor — whose other past credits include Gossip Girl, Blue Bloods and Sarah Polley’s 2011 indie Take This Waltz — is Étoile, a new comedy series on Prime Video, in which Kirby plays the head of a fictional New York City ballet company. He and his on-again, off-again fling Geneviève, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, come up with the idea of swapping their dancers between New York and Paris, creating a publicity stunt as well as a series of culture clashes within their respective corps.
LET’S DANCE Kirby’s Jack locks horns with prima ballerina Cheyenne (played by French star Lou de Laâge) in Étoile. (Philippe Antonello/ Amazon MGM Studios)
Kirby jokes that he asked the creators for a role in which he didn’t have to wake up too early or talk too fast, but in classic Palladino-verse fashion, he spends most episodes walking and chattering through the halls of Lincoln Center. Surrounded by real dancers as background actors, Kirby calls it an environment where you can “delude” yourself into believing it’s all real. “The dance company — their dedication is so intense and inspiring that it rings a bell to kind of come correct and awake to the moment,” he explains. “But they also did this thing where they treated me like the boss. I would walk into a room and they would sort of sit upright. It was just a beautiful thing that they somehow chose to do.”
Hear it all on this week’s Prestige Junkie, which also includes a conversation between me and Tyler Coates taking stock of this year’s field of Emmy contenders, including which surprise contenders may still be waiting for us.
