My high school heartthrob was just crowned one of the sexiest men alive. Ask me how I feel

Every high school has one. He just happened to be ours.

When Emily in Paris came out in October, it took me a couple of weeks to dive in. I’m French. Do you have any idea how exhausting that is? Whenever French culture gets discussed on the global stage, an abundance of takes ensues, and things get unmanageable faster than you can say “French people don’t actually wear berets”.

With Emily in Paris, some people complained that the show wasn’t realistic – as if Darren Star, its creator, was a storied documentarian instead of the man who gave us Sex and the City and Beverly Hills, 90210. Some Americans cringed at Emily’s behavior, while some French people cringed at the depiction of their country. Some found the series boring, or confusing, or both. The outfits were bad, we were told. Emily in Paris was bad. It was 2020, and things were bad, bad, bad.

I wasn’t going to bother watching the show. Life’s too short! There are old ER episodes waiting to be watched for the 25th time! Then, I happened upon a full cast listing, and everything changed. There, alongside Lily Collins and Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, was a name I hadn’t thought of in years, but recognised instantly: Lucas Bravo.

The name transported me back to a time of heavy backpacks, surprise quizzes, and cafeteria lunches. Secret crushes, playground gossip, dreadful PE classes. To most, Lucas Bravo is the handsome actor who plays Gabriel, Emily’s neighbor and love interest in Paris. To me, he’s my former high school heartthrob. He’s the person everyone within a 10-mile radius had a crush on. The one whose name was universally and tacitly acknowledged as the gold standard for charm.

And now the world has noticed. In fact, People Magazine has just crowned my high school heartthrob one of the world’s sexiest men alive – third sexiest to be exact, behind Michael B Jordan and Chris Evans. It’s a funny feeling, having your teenage crush acknowledged around the world. I guess what I’m trying to say is: Welcome to the club, world. We knew you’d catch up eventually.

Bravo and I both happened to attend the Lycée Louis Pasteur, in the small, upscale suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, about 15 years ago. He’s three years older than me, so we didn’t share the same social circle. (Yes, this was the only reason, and it had nothing to do with the fact that I was a nerd and he was, well, a guy destined to one day be designated third sexiest man alive.) But I knew who he was. Everyone knew.

You won’t have read this in many English-language profiles of Bravo, but he’s the son of a rather well-known former soccer player, Daniel Bravo. By the time I attended the same school as his son, the elder Bravo had long retired and become a commentator for sports TV channels, a job he still has now. Lucas’s mother, Eva Bravo, is a singer and an animal rights activist.

But let me tell you a bit more about Neuilly-sur-Seine, the aforementioned Paris suburb where Lucas Bravo and I both lived for a few years. It’s regularly ranked as one of the wealthiest suburbs in France. In fact, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was its mayor from 1983 to 2002. That tells you everything you need to know. Neuilly-sur-Seine, usually shortened to just Neuilly, is a place French people are familiar with. It’s also a place French people tend to have a lot of opinions about.

One of the most striking things about Neuilly is its Montague-vs-Capulet divide between “old money” and “new money”. “Old money” in this context refers to literal aristocratic families who descend from royalty. “New money” refers to anyone who accrued their wealth over the past three generations. Being “new money” means, for example, that you might end up renting an apartment from your aristocratic neighbors who inherited the property from their ancestors and have absolutely no idea how to manage it. It means passing a few unofficial tests, such as wearing the right clothes and the right kind of watch. It means going through life, basically, as the Unsinkable Molly Brown, who survived the sinking of the Titanic and is portrayed by Kathy Bates in the movie.

As the son of a former football player, Bravo was new money. So was my family. This only increased Bravo’s likeability for me and my compatriots – not only was he a third-sexiest man alive in the making, but he differed from the other popped-collar-wearing, moccasin-donning, briefcase-toting (yes, really) boys at school.

Bravo said as much in a 2016 interview for the French magazine Causerie: “Contrary to what most people think, my dad has always let me fend for myself. Even financially, he always told me to work. I’ve had jobs in every sector – I was a waiter, I was the guy who gets ignored all day in front of the Champs-Elysées Gap store during the Christmas period. This really teaches you the value of things.”

When Emily in Paris began making headlines, the internet obsessively asked one question, again and again: Who is Lucas Bravo? And now you know. Well, you know a little more. 

How does it feel to see the world swooning over the guy who you swooned over by the lockers half your life ago? It’s quite delightful. Reader, we’ve known all along. And by “we”, I mean the relatively small cohort of people who came of age in the mid-2000s and attended the Lycée Louis Pasteur. We knew the secrets of the universe before anyone else did. We knew, and we didn’t say anything. And now the word is out.

Welcome, everyone. Take a seat. We’ve been waiting so long for you to catch up.