In the hierarchy of creative careers to avoid in your romantic life, actors fall somewhere between DJs (run! really fast! don’t look back!) and restauranteurs (not ideal). And yet, when you are living your best croissant life in Paris and happen to stumble across a hot French actor with an actual AlloCiné presence, you’re allowed to temporarily amend your principles and swipe droite. Also, France is not exactly Hollywood – people are slightly more humble, egos are a tad more subdued, actors are a bit more normal. Peut être.
We will call him Alain, in honor of Alain Delon, whose ego has, too, been known to precede him. Alain and I matched on Raya a couple of days after my arrival to Paris at the beginning of April. It was a cold, rainy Sunday, and so I spent a good two hours wasting my life chatting with him about n’importe quoi while performing an in-depth YouTube investigation of his work.
The guy was talented. There is nothing I can say to undermine this – he was a true triple threat, an actor-writer-director hybrid who had been monikered by a Very Important Newspaper as “the golden boy of French cinema.” He seemed relatively down to earth and domesticated, even sending me photos of a Sunday brunch he had prepared for his parents, as well as a voice note containing three Russian sentences he remembered from his lycée days. Long story short, I could already picture us hanging out in some imaginary Parisian loft, eating homemade quiche and discussing Truffaut… He was going away for a week, but we arranged to meet up when he returned.
