After Gilmore Girls, Yanic Truesdale had to relearn how to talk at a normal pace

CBC

22-05-2025

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Yanic Truesdale is best known for playing Michel, Stars Hollow's passive aggressive French hotel concierge, on the hit show Gilmore Girls.
In an interview with Q 's Tom Power, the Montreal-born actor recalls how he landed his first big break in the French Canadian hockey series He Shoots, He Scores (Lance et compte) despite not knowing how to skate, and the time he invented a fake assistant named Bernadette to help him negotiate a production of The Birdcage (La cage aux folles) in Quebec. But it wasn't until Truesdale moved to L.A. that his career exploded with his very first Hollywood audition.
"I was in L.A. for a year without being able to find an agent, getting a job, getting an audition, being quite depressed, running out of money — it's not pretty," he says. "And so I had decided by my birthday, if I didn't have a clear sign of something, I would just go back home. And I got Gilmore a week before my birthday."
WATCH | Yanic Truesdale's full interview with Tom Power:
Though Gilmore Girls put Truesdale on the map, it was a tougher gig than it appeared to be from the outside, particularly due to the rapid-fire dialogue that's become a trademark of the show's creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino.
"The truth of the matter is Gilmore was a very complicated, difficult show to film because we didn't have a big budget back then," he says. "We also had an average of 25 pages more than your average one-hour show of dialogue, but we had the same amount of days to shoot it, which is 10…. We were always on overtime. We were always trying to finish the day and to finish what we needed to shoot every day. So it was very stressful for everyone on set and it was a very difficult show."
The director would come to me and say, 'You don't have to speak that fast. That's way too fast.' - Yanic Truesdale
Truesdale emphasizes that filming the show was a "beautiful experience" that changed his life, but the reality was that it wasn't always easy. After Gilmore Girls, he says he had some trouble adjusting back to speaking at a normal pace.
"I would do another show and the director would come to me and say, 'You don't have to speak that fast. That's way too fast,'" he recalls. "We were just so trained to have that pace that it took me a minute to go back to my normal pace."
WATCH | Official trailer for Étoile:
Now, Truesdale has reunited with Sherman-Palladino on her latest fast-talking series, Étoile, which is about two world-renowned ballet companies, one in New York and one in Paris, that swap their most talented stars in an attempt to save their institutions.
Unlike Gilmore Girls, Truesdale says shooting Étoile has been a much less stressful experience because the show has more time and a bigger budget. But he did have one special request of Sherman-Palladino this time around: he didn't want his character to have a French accent.
"I was a little concerned because I didn't want to do another version of Michel," he says. "So I suggested that we should drop the French accent for sure…. But, you know, [the writers] have a way of writing, and sarcasm and cynicism is in their writing … so I just had to work in order to create a different dynamic with my leading lady [Charlotte Gainsbourg], which couldn't be more different than Lauren Graham."