🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Emily in Paris is filled with meet cutes, both romantic and platonic. Emily (Lily Collins) and Mindy (Ashley Park) fell in (friendship) love at first sight in a Parisian park. Emily and a begrudging Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) couldn’t deny their chemistry during French class. (Emily does get the bulk of the sweet-meets.) But only once in the history of Emily in Paris has a connection been made over the intricacies of tax law. That’s what happens in the Season 3 premiere, though, when Alfie ends up rubbing elbows with Maison Lavaux boss Antoine (William Abadie). 

Business acumen instantly recognizes business acumen and sparks fly, creating one of Season 3’s most exciting, and unexpected, duos. Only someone as elegant as Antoine could whip up a partnership over expensive fragrance, international financial law and Scotch, neat. 

“Antoine is always looking for great talent and has a nose for it. So finding Alfie was a blessing,” Abadie, a French actor who spent decades living in the States, tells Tudum. After two previous seasons of circling married girlfriend Syvlie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) — while remaining wed to his own wife, Catherine (Charley Fouquet) — Antoine spends Season 3 laser focused on his business. He hires Alfie as his CFO, capitalizing on Abadie and Laviscount’s real-life “bond.” 

Months after filming, Laviscount is still impressed by how “smooth” his scene partner is on-screen and off. “I don’t think there’s a more well-rounded, more gentlemanly human being that I’ve ever worked with,” he says. “Alfie and Antoine have this mutual ground that’s written in luxury.” 

Yet Antoine and Alfie can’t help but butt heads on where luxury becomes excess. Antoine is happy to ditch priceless batches of fragrance that don’t meet his high standards and buy unimaginably expensive sports cars. Alfie isn’t so sure.  

Stéphanie Branchu/Netflix

“In order to get something, you need to give something,” Abadie playfully counters. “So I think spending all that dough for all those toys and houses is necessary. And you’ve got to heat the pool.” 

This extravagant outlook is on full display in Episode 6, when the Emily in Paris cast heads to Provence for a McLaren-Maison Lavaux collaboration. (Abadie already hopes the event’s central purple car returns for Season 4.) Antoine’s country home isn’t simply a château — it’s a bastide, as Luc (Bruno Gouery) points out. La Maison Lavaux boasts honey and olive oil production, endless lavender fields and enough bedrooms to make a hotel jealous. Abadie calls the filming location — and the ability to get a further peek into Antoine’s world — a “gift.”  

“It’s as good as it gets, really, to have that window open into this world of fantasy, which is also rooted in reality because we’re going to all those places,” Abadie concludes. “One fantasizes about those bigger things in life... For Antoine, that reality is beautiful — and pretty much matches mine to some extent too.”