Omar Sy was sure he saw Jesus. He had just dropped his children off at school and was driving home on Sunset Boulevard when he spotted a man with flowing hair and a long beard, dressed in a white toga. “He was walking barefoot in the street, and I’m staring at him, slowing down to get a better look. I’m asking myself, ‘Am I hallucinating, or what?’ ” Sy recalled. No one else seemed to notice. “And right next to him there’s a girl marching along with her Starbucks, and then, on the other side, a guy doing his jogging, and some other dudes washing their car. I was the only one looking.” Sy, who was born and raised in France, had only recently arrived in Los Angeles, and, gawking at what seemed normal to everyone else, he felt conspicuously foreign. “That was what blew me away about Los Angeles,” he said. “But then I discovered that’s what pleases me so much—you dress how you like, you walk how you like, and nobody looks.”
Sy has lived in L.A. for nearly a decade now; he does yoga and hikes the canyons and switches from French to English to say things like “perfect fit” and “make a statement.” He’s played a time-travelling superhero (“X-Men: Days of Future Past”) and a robot who metamorphoses into a sports car (“Transformers: The Last Night”), and worked alongside Bradley Cooper (“Burnt”), Tom Hanks (“Inferno”), and a quartet of shrieking velociraptors (the “Jurassic World” franchise). His “Jurassic” co-star Chris Pratt told me that Sy’s magnetism made him ideal for the role: “It was so important to cast someone with enough physicality to hold his own opposite me . . . as well as a sense of goodness to sell the idea of a real love, and a kind of warmth opposite these essentially C.G.I. creatures.” (What’s more Hollywood than a quote from Chris Pratt?)
In January, Netflix released the first five episodes of “Lupin,” a French-language series starring Sy as Assane Diop, a high-minded lowlife whose crimes might be understood as acts of reclamation. A second installment of five episodes is available now. “Lupin” draws from Maurice Leblanc’s series of detective stories about the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. Leblanc created Lupin in 1905, serializing his adventures in the popular science magazine Je Sais Tout. Leblanc had ambitions of becoming a serious novelist, but Lupin proved so lucrative that he devoted the better part of his career to the character, writing dozens of novels and novellas, which were adapted into comic books, plays, films, and television shows. (The most famous of these was a nineteen-seventies series starring Georges Descrières.) By the time Sy came along, the franchise was slightly shopworn. “When you think of Lupin, at least in France, it’s a bit dusty,” Sy said. “I didn’t want to come in and play Lupin like the rest of them.”
Despite its antique source material, the show has become an enormous international hit, topping Netflix’s charts in such diverse markets as Germany, Brazil, and the Philippines. In its first month, it drew viewers from seventy-six million households, more than “The Queen’s Gambit” or “Bridgerton.” “Lupin,” according to one of Netflix’s internal metrics, is the company’s second-biggest original début of all time. As the artistic producer, the headliner, and the unmistakable raison d’être of the only French-language show ever to immediately hit Netflix’s American Top Ten, Sy has become something of a roadside Jesus in his own right. “He has this weird cocktail of characteristics where absolutely everyone—men, women, children—finds him completely charming,” George Kay, one of the show’s creators, said.
Sy is literally the second most popular man in France, according to an annual poll to which the French give a surprising amount of credence. (Sy has topped the list, as have Jacques Cousteau, Yannick Noah, and Zinedine Zidane.) At the time of Sy’s Jesus sighting, in 2012, he was little known in America. But he was already so famous at home that he and his wife, Hélène, whom he met as a teen-ager and married in 2007, felt that it had become impossible for their family to live normally in France. “Our kids were starting to lose their first names,” Sy recalled.
His film “Les Intouchables,” released the year before, had been a huge success, eventually grossing more than four hundred million dollars worldwide. (Remakes in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Hindi, as well as in Telugu and Tamil, were soon announced.) Sy won a best-actor César—the French equivalent of an Oscar—for his portrayal of Driss, an irrepressible roughneck from the banlieue of Paris who stumbles into a job caring for Philippe, a lovesick, quadriplegic aristocrat played by François Cluzet.
Still, for much of his career, Sy had felt like a fraud. Other actors he knew had pursued their work through rejection and penury with single-minded dedication. Sy had started doing comedy on the radio as a lark, transitioned to goofy sketches on television, and then branched into film. He’d been successful since his teens, in an industry where even the greatest talents often went years without recognition. “The notion of being an actor was complicated for me,” Sy told me. “I came into this by chance. So I would think, Well, it’s all a bit of a scam.”
In Hollywood, Sy had to start from the bottom, or somewhere near it. He had a César, but had never been on an audition. Now he was schlepping around a new city, a tourist in his own industry, reciting his résumé for casting directors and vying for roles in a language he was still so unfamiliar with that he had to memorize his lines phonetically. “I had to say my name, what I’d done, who my agent was,” Sy said. “Whereas, in France, they were sending my agent scripts by the truckload.”
The move was risky, career-wise. Other French actors—Dany Boon, Jean Dujardin—had tried to crack Hollywood, with limited success. To improve his language skills, Sy studied with a private tutor for four hours a day and spent the rest of his time glued to “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” The show left lasting marks on his vocabulary. “I started saying ‘oh, my God’ and ‘seriously,’ ” he admitted.
A person with less tolerance for risk might have viewed the situation as a regression, even a humiliation, but, for Sy, it constituted progress. “I felt like I was paying a debt,” he said. “Somehow, the experience of being rejected, of trying out and never hearing back, gave me the legitimacy that I needed. It diminished my feeling of imposture.”
Gaumont, the French production company, developed “Lupin” as a vehicle specifically for Sy, who was keen to try a scripted television series. In “Lupin,” Assane Diop is an Arsène Lupin buff, a reader of the books since childhood. The idea to build the show around a fan, in the era of the Beliebers and the Beyhive, came from Sy. “It was a way to give the concept a modern spin,” he told me, this spring. “A way to make it my Lupin.”
We were talking in a warmly appointed conference room—baby grand, beaded chairs—at a hotel in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris, where Sy was stopping over after several days on the set of a film in the French Alps. One of the great sweater wearers, Sy was in a black pullover and gray sweatpants, with bright-white socks, spotless sneakers, and a black gaiter mask. His aesthetic sense informs the show, where he insisted on a sweeping, superheroesque silhouette for Assane. (A company called The Leather City sells a “Lupin”-inspired greatcoat, touting the “hybrid of vintage and coolness from the street style character.”) Sy was also responsible for a chase scene on the rooftops of Paris, and for the aching, ambivalent tone of the relationship between Assane and Claire, the mother of his child. “I could decide this, that, and the other thing about Assane,” Sy said. “It was truly a bespoke character.”