Trivia / Lupin (2021)

• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • How the entire series came into fruition. Omar Sy was approached by Netflix and Gaumont to build a series based around him. When asked what character he wanted to play, he chose Arsène Lupin, because he viewed the Gentleman Thief as a "French James Bond".
    • According to series creator George Kay, Sy is actively involved in coming up with plot points and storylines. Notably, it was his idea to have Assane impersonate Raoul's basketball coach in order to get closer to his family without them knowing it.
  • Claire's activities in Part 3 apparently came about because Ludivine Sagnier asked to be allowed to do something cool.
• Actor-Shared Background: Zigzagged. Assane Diop is French of Senegalese extraction, and so is Omar Sy. However, Sy was born in France, while Assane actually did spend his early years in Senegal. Also, Sy descends from the Fulani ethnic group (and grew up speaking the Fula language at home), while Assane's surname "Diop" suggests that his origins lie in the Wolof people.
• Approval of God: Maurice Leblanc's granddaughter has said that her grandfather would have liked the series.
• Billing Displacement: Nicole Garcia (Anne Pellegrini) is the fourth name listed in the credits for the episodes she appears in—after Omar Sy, Ludivine Sagnier, and Clotilde Hesme, and before the likes of Soufiane Guerrab (Guédira) and Antoine Gouy (Benjamin)—despite having minimal screen time in the show overall. This is likely due to Garcia being a very well-known and highly-regarded actress in France, while Guerrab and Gouy aren't as well-known.
• Cast the Expert: Mathieu Lamboley, the composer of the series' soundtrack, conducts the orchestra in Chapter 10.
• Celebrity Resemblance:
  • Many Anglophone viewers have remarked on the facial similarity between Hervé Pierre (Hubert Pellegrini) and Kevin Spacey.
  • In his present-day incarnation, Keller is a dead-ringer for American game show host Steve Harvey (even more amusingly, his actor is called Steve in Real Life).
• Celebrity Voice Actor: Betsy Brandt, best-known for playing Marie Schrader in Breaking Bad, provides the voice of Juliette in the English dub.
• Completely Different Title: In an odd reversal of The Foreign Subtitle, the series was released in its native France with the subtitle "dans l'ombre d'Arsène" ("in the shadow of Arsène"), which also turns up on the title cards in Part 1. This was quietly dropped for subsequent seasons, possibly due to the show gaining an unexpectedly large international fanbase using just the name Lupin.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Upon the series announcement along with its lead, many news outlets outright stated that Arsène Lupin himself was going to undergo a Race Lift. The series is actually about a different character who lives in the 21st century and styles himself into an expy of Lupin, since he's a fan. The latter remains a fictional character In-Universe.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Ludmilla Makowski (young Claire) and Léa Bonneau (young Juliette) are in their twenties, but play teenagers.
  • Omar Sy, Ludivine Sagnier, Antoine Gouy and Clotilde Hesme, all of whom were around 40 at the time of filming, play Assane, Claire, Benjamin and Juliette in both the present timeline and 2006, when the characters are supposed to be in their mid to late twenties. Digital de-aging was employed.
  • In 1995, Anne Pellegrini is probably somewhere in her late forties. She's played by septuagenarian Nicole Garcia. Again, special effects were used to make her appear younger.
  • Both inverted and played straight for Hubert Pellegrini, whose witness testimony papers reveal that he was born in the 1940s and is thus in his 70s during the series' present-day, and was about 50 in 1995. Hervé Pierre was in his sixties when the episodes were shot.
  • Inverted for the present-day version of Keller. He's meant to be substantially older than Assane In-Universe, but his actor, Steve Tientcheu, was born in 1982, while Omar Sy was born in 1978. (This also makes Tientcheu a year younger than Assane, whose canonical birth occurred in May 1981.)
• Defictionalization: There are now re-editions of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar (the first novel in Maurice Leblanc's series) that look like◊ the edition of the novel that Assane owns, complete with advertisements for the Netflix series (of course) and insert photographs of the characters.
• Fake Nationality: Assane's parents are from Senegal, but the actors who play them (Fargass Assandé and Naky Sy Savané) are both Ivorian.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Money Heist, although there is a mild Fandom Rivalry between the two over which is the better Netflix-distributed internationally successful European crime caper show. Amusingly, the Money Heist spinoff series Berlin was met with a mixed reception from Money Heist fans...largely due to its being seen as a somewhat inferior version of Lupin rather than recapturing the tone of its predecessor.
• Follow the Leader: The French division of Netflix has released a whole string of original action/heist/crime-thriller shows in the wake of Lupin, although none of them has, thus far, managed to come close to matching the global success of their inspiration.
• Genius Bonus: At the end of Chapter 10, shortly before Assane's electronic watch goes off in their apartment, Claire is helping Raoul study history for school. The man she quizzes him about, Alexandre "Marius" Jacob, was a Real Life Gentleman Thief from Marseille who was one of Maurice Leblanc's primary inspirations in creating the Arsène Lupin character.
• International Coproduction: The show is French through and through...but its creator and main writer, George Kay, is from England. Kay has admitted to having a fairly poor understanding of French—his co-writer François Uzan is responsible for translating all of the English language scripts he's written.
  • Marcela Said, who directed episodes 4 and 5, is Chilean, and Daniel Grou, who helmed the third and fourth episodes of Part 3, is Québecois.
• Periphery Demographic: The show has become popular with French instructors, who often play scenes or entire episodes from it for their students in order to provide them with examples of spoken French in both formal and colloquial registers.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Ludivine Sagnier initially rose to prominence as French cinema's resident frequently-naked Genki Girl. As Claire, she embodies a Girl Next Door turned single mother. Sagnier has said that part of the reason she wanted to be in the series—in addition to her desire to work with Omar Sy—was because she would be able to watch it with her children.
  • Clotilde Hesme's tall, wiry build and distinctive angular features have led her to be frequently cast as The Lad-ette or otherwise androgynous characters. Juliette Pellegrini, on the other hand, is a decidedly feminine Socialite.
• Same Language Dub: Spanish speakers interested in watching the show dubbed over have a choice between Castilian and Latin American versions.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting: Mamadou Haidara and Ludmilla Makowski, who play the '90s versions of Assane and Claire, have attracted a great deal of praise, both due to their physical resemblance to their older counterparts and the extent to which they capture their personalities and mannerisms.
• Series Continuity Error: In the 1995 flashbacks, when Assane first meets Juliette, he mentions that his fourteenth birthday is around the corner, and it seems that the Arsène Lupin book gifted to him by Babakar was intended as a birthday present. The police file on the case indicates that all of this was going on in October of that year, but Assane's gravestone, which is shown in Part 3, establishes that his birthday is on May 13th.
• Shown Their Work: "Diop" is a Wolof surname, and as such the song that Mariama sings to Assane over the phone is in the Wolof language.
• Sleeper Hit: The show became an unexpected worldwide smash in January 2021, and has turned into Netflix's third-most-popular non-English language series, after Squid Game and the Money Heist franchise. It's by far the biggest French show on the streamer (with views for its third season exceeding the viewership of every other Netflix France series released in 2023 combined), and is likely the most globally-successful French series of all time.^note This excludes the likes of Emily in Paris, i.e. American shows that are set in France.
• Spoiler Cover: Netflix inexplicably decided to release an image of Assane and Benjamin working with Philippe Courbet as part of the promotional material in advance of Part 2's debut in June 2021, spoiling one of the biggest Reveals in that set of episodes.
• Tie-In Novel: Lupin: Échec à la Reine, a 2004-set prequel in which Benjamin gets A Day in the Limelight alongside Assane. Aside from them, Claire is the only other character from the series to appear in the story, although Hubert Pellegrini gets a brief mention at the end.
• Tourist Bump: Fans of the show flocked to Étretat after its release, to the point where the town has struggled to deal with all the extra traffic (and locals have begun complaining).
• Troubled Production:
  • The filming of the first season was halted in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and resumed in June. This resulted in a minor Temporary Bulk Change for Assane since, by his own admission, Omar Sy gained five kilograms (for Americans, that's around 11 pounds) during the first lockdown.
  • When Part 3 was being filmed in a suburb of Paris, about twenty men with balaclavas attacked the set with firecrackers and stole €300,000 worth of audiovisual material and whatever money crew members had on them. Luckily, nobody was injured, and Omar Sy, who was present for the robbery, appeared at the César awards which took place that night. Production resumed a few days later.
• Typecasting: Omar Sy as a guy who engages in criminal activity but manages to win people over due to his positive attitude and bottomless charisma—are we talking about Assane or Driss from Intouchables?
  • Also, Omar Sy in yet another immigrant's tale.
• Voiced Differently in the Dub: The English-language voice actor for Assane does away with a lot of Omar Sy's natural exuberance and Large Ham tendencies, so his version of the character instead comes across as more of The Stoic.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Omar Sy was originally meant to play the real Arsene Lupin but was made into an original character.
  • There were plans to have Assane make an appearance in the Paris-set Money Heist spinoff series Berlin, thus confirming that Lupin and Money Heist take place in a Shared Universe. However, this fell through due to scheduling conflicts.
• You Might Remember Me from...:
  • Omar Sy for Intouchables, obviously, or else Barry from Jurassic World.
  • Ludivine Sagnier played Tinkerbell in the 2003 live-action adaptation of Peter Pan. Viewers of a different persuasion may also remember her as the Shameless Fanservice Girl from several early-aughts François Ozon films.
  • For French audiences, Pierre Lottin (adult Bruno) is very well known as Idiot Hero Wilfried in the popular Les Tuche comedy franchise.

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