Gilmore Girls' Yanic Truesdale On Taking His Well-Honed Right-Hand Man Act To Amazon's Étoile

Yanic Truesdale had no interest in reheating his Gilmore Girls nachos when he was courted to co-star in Étoile, Amazon's upcoming ballet dramedy that reunites the artist formerly known as Lorelai Gilmore's No. 2, Michel, with his Gilmore bosses Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino.

"When Amy approached me and explained my Étoile character would have a female boss I was like, 'Oh, no... ," Truesdale recalls to TVLine. "I didn't want us falling into the trap of playing that same kind of French character again."

But as the Stars Hollow vet soon discovered, his role as Raphael, assistant director to the Paris Opera and Ballet working under Charlotte Gainsbourg's Geneviève, is in many ways the "opposite" of Michel, explaining, "Raphael is Geneviève's bulldog, whereas Michel was always suffering of Lorelai. He saw Lorelai as a little sister he had to teach and groom into a decent person. Raphael admires Geneviève. He wants her to do her best. And he'll take a bullet for her. So it's a very different energy and dynamic between the two of us."

The polarity between Gilmore Girls and Étoile was even more stark behind the scenes. For one thing, "We had no money on Gilmore Girls — we have money now," Truesdale confesses with a laugh. "I feel it and see it on [Étoile] — just in the [extra] time we have. People don't realize that on Gilmore Girls we had an average of 25 [script] pages more than a normal show, but we still had to shoot an episode in 10 days. It was insane. We shot for 23 hours in a row. None of that is happening [on Étoile], which is lovely. You can sleep at night."

Additionally, each season of Gilmore Girls consisted of roughly 24 episodes. "Now we have the luxury to take our time to tell that story in eight episodes," the French-Canadian notes. "So it's like fine dining. You have time.

"This is a better fit with my personality," Truesdale adds of Étoile's more humane workload. "I'm a perfectionist and I like to try things and I like to make it perfect. So here I have time to work that way, and I appreciate it."

It also helps when you have an unspoken shorthand with the boss. "We were shooting an [Étoile] scene and Amy came up to me and she just looked at me and I went, 'Yeah, I got it,'" Truesdale says with a smile.  "That's the beauty of knowing someone for 25 years. You don't need to speak. It saves a lot of time and insecurity. And the quality of the work is better."

Étoile's inaugural eight-episode season drops in its entirety Thursday, April 24.