Emily may be saying au revoir to Gabriel after all. After Lucas Bravo expressed displeasure with the direction his Emily in Paris character was headed at the end of season four, a source close to the hit Netflix show reportedly told US Weekly that Bravo’s future on Emily in Paris is up in the air.
“The show will go on with or without Lucas,” the insider told US Weekly. “The show is Emily in Paris—not Gabriel in Paris.”
Bravo has played Emily’s main love interest—her on-again, off-again French chef boyfriend Gabriel—on the hit rom-com since the show premiered on Netflix in October of 2020. After four seasons of will-they-won’t-they, navigating romance, breakups, and even a false pregnancy scare, Emily (Lily Collins) and Gabriel are currently on the outs, with Emily falling for the Italian Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini) and considering leaving her beloved Paris for Rome.
After the show’s season-four finale, Bravo wasn’t shy about his displeasure with his character’s arc on the series, telling IndieWire that Emily in Paris “became not fun for me to shoot,” and that his character had been “slowly turned into guacamole.”
“The ‘sexy chef’ was very much part of me in season one, and we grew apart season after season because of the choices he makes and because of the direction they make him take,” the actor said. “I’ve never been so far away from him.”
Bravo also complained about the lack of agency he’s had as an actor in shaping Gabriel’s storyline. “There is only so much I can do in the limits of a script,” he said. “I tried for seasons to bring nuances, but we don’t have much liberty on set. We cannot change a word or an emotion. They know what they want, and we just have to comply.”
US Weekly reported that, according to the source, the Emily in Paris team didn’t take kindly to those comments. “Everyone is so upset about the remarks he made,” the source said. “There is going to be a lot of tension.”
There’s a chance that Bravo will avoid the tension altogether and simply recuse himself from the fifth season, which was officially confirmed in September. “It makes me question if I want to be part of season five…because my contract ends at season four,” Bravo told IndieWire. “I really want to see if Gabriel gets back to his fun, cheeky, playful, alive self. Because three seasons playing melancholic, sad, depressed, and lost is not fun anymore. It’s a comedy, everybody is having fun around me, everybody is jumping around, and I’m just slowly sinking into God knows what.”
Vanity Fair has reached out to Netflix for comment.
