![]() ![]() “I found the idea of a 6-foot-2 Black man sneaking around in both high society and the underworld interesting.” “I liked the ‘gentleman thief’ aspect a lot but I wanted to subvert it and give it a social angle,” Leterrier said. In the first case, he becomes invisible, a Black man among many others in the second, he exploits the fact that he stands out in a sea of white faces, distracting his marks. When Assane sets out to swipe a heavily guarded necklace at the Louvre, for example, he alternates between going undercover as a janitor and passing as a rich art-lover attending an auction. But don’t expect any hyper-realistic latex masks à la “Mission: Impossible” - Assane is resolutely low-tech, befitting the series’s fleet footed, deliberately old-fashioned bent. Like Leblanc’s rapscallion, the adult Assane steals and gets out of jams thanks to his silver tongue and his talent for shape-shifting. (The series is subtitled “In the Shadow of Arsène.”) Assane’s most precious possession became a Lupin book bestowed upon him by his dad, a gift that would shape his entire life. The elder Diop, who worked hard to give his son the tools he needed to succeed in French society (starting with the importance of correct spelling), committed suicide in jail after being accused of theft, leaving young Assane an orphan. When we meet Sy’s Assane, he is obsessed with avenging his widower father (Fargass Assandé), who died 25 years earlier. “We wanted to see Omar in all his humanity and his experience with the myth, rather than call him Arsène Lupin and do something that had already been done.” Ultimately, “George Kay came in with an idea we all loved,” he added. “Does Omar actually play Lupin? Is it contemporary or classic?” ![]() “Our first step was to figure out where we wanted to go,” Leterrier said in a video call. (The series was produced by Gaumont for Netflix.) He said that it took a little while to zero in on a concept. The French filmmaker Louis Leterrier (“The Transporter,” “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance”), who directed the first three episodes of “Lupin,” was an early member of the creative team, from before the idea was brought to Netflix. “Because there’s lots about Lupin I love: the tricks, the cons.” “But when I was told that Netflix wanted to do it with Omar Sy, he was attached, the combination of those two things made it really interesting to me,” Kay said. George Kay (“Criminal”), the show’s British creator and showrunner, said in a video chat that he had been more familiar with other turn-of-the-20th-century pop culture creations like Sherlock Holmes, the Scarlet Pimpernel or A.J. I became totally addicted by working on ‘Lupin.’” “Later on, I connected the dots between the books, the TV shows I saw as a kid, and some mangas. “Honestly, it was just something you had to know, a part of culture,” he said. Sy, who is also credited as an artistic producer, acknowledged that when he first proposed basing a project on Lupin, he was mostly familiar with the character’s reputation. Sy, 42, plays not Lupin but a debonair Parisian named Assane Diop, the son of a Senegalese immigrant, who idolizes the fictional thief. That Lupin became the subject of several anime adaptations, including Hayao Miyazaki’s feature debut, “Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro,” and the recent 3-D release “Lupin III: The First.” ![]() Lupin is also a popular character in Japan, where in the 1960s the manga artist Kazuhiko Kato, known by his pen name, Monkey Punch, invented a grandson named Lupin III. A splashy 2004 film starred Romain Duris. ![]() An entire generation can still sing the theme song from the series that ran in 1971-74. France alone has produced several TV adaptations and movies about the thief. The hero of many shorts stories and novels, Lupin was first seen as the French answer to a certain British detective Leblanc even cheekily wrote unauthorized crossover stories starring one Herlock Sholmès. He prefers disguise and persuasion to violence and is so dashing that his victims almost thank him for the honor of being robbed. Like Thomas Crown, Danny Ocean, Simon Templar and (to include a gentlewoman) Selina Kyle, Lupin is elegant and efficient. Except there is a plot twist: Arsène Lupin is not a character in the series that bears his name - at least not in the flesh.īut by now many American readers are probably wondering “Wait … Lup-who?”Ĭreated by the French writer Maurice Leblanc in 1905, Arsène Lupin is an elite member of the gang of delightful rogues known as gentleman thieves. ![]()
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