🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Season 3 of Emily in Paris can be summed up in four words, according to co-star Kate Walsh: “It’s a whole situation.”

The actor plays Madeline, the American boss of titular marketing executive Emily Cooper (Lily Collins). Once upon a time, Madeline was supposed to move across the pond to oversee her Chicago firm’s new acquisition, luxury Parisian agency Savoir — until she found out she was pregnant and sent protégé Emily in her place. 

A few months later, aka Season 2, Madeline makes a surprise visit to check in on her mentee’s progress and, in the process, alienates the entire French staff with her American attitude. Madeline might be fluent in French, but no one would ever mistake her for Parisian (for starters, there’s that accent). She can be abrasive, Walsh reflects. “I said at one point, ‘I feel like the Grinch, and poor Emily is the little dog with me. We might as well tie reindeer horns on her head.’ ” So it’s no surprise that at the end of the season, the French head of Savoir, Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), resigns along with her entire staff to start a new agency and, unbeknownst to Madeline, asks Emily to go with them. 

As Season 3 begins, the French staff has just departed — “It’s a disaster,” Walsh tells Tudum — and, oh yeah, Madeline is still pregnant. (Story time moves differently than real time!) Work-life balance is such a challenge — although portraying Madeline’s career crisis while sporting an ultra-pregnant baby bump prop did lend itself to physical comedy. “Visually, it’s so funny,” she says. “One of my favorite things to shoot was the scene in the boardroom with Lucas [Bravo, who plays chef Gabriel] and Antoine [the perfume CEO played by William Abadie] with the belly. It was really fun to impose that belly on everyone. But then equally, I was happy to be like, ‘No more pregnancy scenes? OK, great.’”

Stéphanie Branchu/Netflix

After Madeline has the baby, she has to deal with a whole host of new problems: On the childcare side, she’s covered (“She does have help. There’s a very stern nanny,” Walsh reflects), but on the work side, “it’s all of the things. It’s breastfeeding at work. There’s a whole torturous storyline with [a heatwave]. It’s a disaster.” And of course, her star employee eventually decides not to work with her anymore.

Madeline takes Emily’s news in stride, however. After all, Madeline had her own fun in Paris when she was younger. And other people’s decisions don’t really faze her anyway. Like always, Walsh says, “[Madeline] makes it all about her.”

Emily in Paris Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.

Additional reporting by Ruth Kinane.