Ménage à Quatre

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.

Two weeks later, I had completely forgotten about my near brush with French fame, when Alain reappeared. To be precise, he messaged me around 6 p.m. on Easter Sunday to announce that he was back, suggesting a coffee that very evening. I told him I had friends in town from London and couldn’t meet until Tuesday. He was leaving again the following day, leaving us a slim window.

The whole thing was brimming with red flags – why coffee and not a drink? why hadn’t he tried scheduling this before? – but I was three glasses of wine in and ignored them. Instead, I decided that this was an excellent opportunity to entertain my friends, and invited him to meet us for post-dinner drinks that evening. He said he didn’t want to impose and proposed that we all come over instead. I told him we had a dinner reservation, but he was welcome to join us at Clown Bar later. He said he would try to come, given that he didn’t fall asleep beforehand. I advised him to drink. He told me that he didn’t drink, but he would smoke a petard (joint) to stay up instead. We were off to an excellent start.

The plan was for him to come after dinner, but yours truly got her military time confused, so Alain arrived just in time for the main course. Albeit too blond to ever be my type, he was objectively handsome, with classic features and a solid build that alluded to a regular workout regimen. He also had what I call Leading Man Energy, i.e. the ability to to garner collective admiration by making each person in his presence feel special. Following a round of bises, each one of us was granted a one-on-one Q&A that covered everything from our backgrounds, to our professional paths, to the names of our dogs. Something about his demeanor felt too confident for my liking, and yet I appreciated his ability to lead the conversation, leaving me free to relax and enjoy my meal. Speaking of which, Alain happily helped himself to a hearty portion of our fancy three-way-duck situation, honoring it with a satiated sigh of approval.

At some point, I decided to revert the spotlight to him. “So, what kind of films do you usually act in?” I asked, adding, “I’m sorry, I kind of forgot, we spoke a while ago.” I wasn’t being coy – my brain is akin to Swiss Cheese when it comes to non-egocentric information.

Alain smiled. “It’s ok, I’m actually glad you don’t know who I am. It’s refreshing.” The way he said it, you would have thought he was the Leonardo DiCaprio of France. Accredited as he was by the press, I had actually run his name by a few French people and none of them had been familiar with him. Judging by the nonchalant behavior of our waitress, neither was she.

One of my friends sensed that he was getting on a high horse and decided to bring him down a notch. “So, is acting your main job? Or do you do other things on the side? It’s a pretty tough industry, right?” she inquired, feigning concern for his financial wellbeing.

Whoops. This much anonymity, Alain couldn’t handle.

“Um, I’m actually pretty famous here,” he said, whipping out his phone. For a second, I thought he was going to Google himself, but instead he just pulled up a play he had starred in in London, as if to demonstrate the reach of his celebrity across the Chunnel.

He told us that he was not just an actor, but also a screenwriter – in fact, he had just written a film about women our age! We pressed him for details, and he eagerly recounted the entire plot, which sounded un peu sexist, un peu ageist, and très un-2019. While I salute every creative who puts something out into this world, I truly believe that men need to stop writing about the female experience – ideally, forever.

We ordered dessert. Helping himself to some grain-sprinkled designer crème brulée, Alain decided to spice it up by asking us some group questions, starting with “What is your best celebrity story?” He then went on to recount his own youthful tryst with the now-wife of a Z-list celeb – an underwhelming story, especially for a “famous” person.

And yet, the more bizarre moment was yet to come. “So, how do you girls feel about drugs?” he asked us next – casually, as though inquiring whether we were enjoying the desert.

I guess none of us had a cocaine habit to fess up to, because we all just sat there, awkwardly shrugging. Idiot that I am, I decided to alleviate the tension.

“Um, does sugar count?” I joked, going on to explain that I couldn’t go a day without shoving a couple of mini-containers of honey down my throat. Everybody chimed in on the dangers of sugar, and it was soon established that I needed to quit immediately. (Whateva.) 

As Alain stared at me as though I was Britney Spears mid-breakdown, my own eyes landed on his wine glass, which he had theatrically flipped upside down at the beginning of the night. Come think, why would somebody ask such a weird question…unless they themselves had a history of substance abuse? I decided to investigate.

“So, you don’t drink, right?” I asked.

“No,” said Alain, looking extremely proud of himself..

“How come?”

“I tried once when I was 14 and hated it.”

“But you smoke weed?” I confirmed, remembering the petard.

“Yes, I love it,” he said. He went on to explain that weed was natural, wonderful, and made him a God in bed. “When I smoke, I can keep going and going all night.” He looked so in love with himself in that moment, that I was almost certain he was going to suggest a ménage a quatre.

The bill arrived. “Can I put down 20 euros?” asked the Very Famous and Successful Actor who, by the way, had tasted our entire dinner. We shooed away his twenty and split the bill three ways.

Outside, my friends walked a few steps away from us to give us “space.” In a normal date scenario, this was usually that awkward moment when the guy fidgets around a little, then suggest grabbing a drink somewhere else. Alas, Alain didn’t fidget, nor did he drink.

“Do you want to come to my place?” he asked. What was more unnerving than the question itself was the way he posed it – presumptuously, confidently, without as much as attempting to bribe me with something interesting, like a private piano concerto or a f*cking petard. Nope, this was a straightforward offer to come over and have sex with him, just because he was “actually pretty famous.”

“No thank you,” I said, “but I would love to hang out again!”

He shrugged, as though this information was of no importance to him. “Ok. Nice meeting you.” He turned, and I realized that he was about to walk away without as much as saying good-bye to my friends. Imagining the incredulous questions on their end, I decided to stop him in his tracks.

“GUYS, ALAIN IS LEAVING! SAY BYE!” I hollered. The girls turned around, leaving Alain no choice but to plaster a fake smile on his face and give everybody half-hearted good bye bises. Alain the Leading Man was gone, and only the Alain the Asshole remained.

A true actor, he couldn’t resist a Grand Finale. “Good luck quitting sugar!” he proclaimed, rather dramatically, after which he turned around and walked off into the night (or, at least, to the bike rack).

I was certain that this was the end of Alain, but then he texted me the next day to ask – are you ready for this? – whether I had quit sugar. It was rude so I didn’t respond, earning myself a follow-up message a few hours later, which I promptly ignored as well.

The next day, I happened to mention the story to a (cultured) French friend, who was shocked – he had seen all of Alain’s films and claimed the guy to be “an actual genius.” And so, I decided to give it another go – just so I could be friends with an actual genius, at the very least. I had been reading a lot about men not responding well to passive-aggressive (my fave!), and so I went for a straightforward approach. Here is the exchange that ensued.

Apparently, Alain wasn’t a big fan of straightforward – I guess, that’s not how “true genius” works. And this is how I learned what I had known for years, which is that success and mass admiration do irreversible numbers on the human ego and moral compass, creating a segment of people who must be avoided at all cost. Translation: all actors are batshit crazy, regardless of where they hail from.

In unrelated news, I’m still eating sugar.