Omar Sy is in a good mood. "I'm in Paris! Do you want to see a bit of Paris?" the jovial Sysays, as means of introduction on our Zoom call, before jumping up, pointing his phone out the window of his hotel room to show off the view: "The Eiffel Tower!" "The Champs-Élysées!
Paris. My hometown." Sy is back in the city he grew up in thanks to Lupin, the French-language crime-comedy series that has become a monster hit for Netflix.
The show, inspired by Maurice Leblanc's early 20th century novels about gentleman thief and master of disguise Arsène Lupin, sees Sy play Assane Diop, a second-generation Senegalese immigrant who re-creates some of Lupin's famous capers, using his Blackness as an invisibility cloak around his white upper-crust.