In true Palladino-verse fashion, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino’s new Prime Video series Étoile is a star-studded spectacle that features its fair share of thrilling, jaw-dropping guest appearances.
As predicted, fan-favorite Gilmore Girls and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel alum like Yanic Truesdale and the great Kelly Bishop are in attendance. Professional ballet dancers, choreographers, and theater performers — including Tiler Peck, Unity Phelan, and Robbie Fairchild — step into the spotlight. And other unexpected, exciting faces pop up throughout Étoile‘s first eight episodes, including legendary singer David Byrne.
In an unexpected twist, an Episode 5 scene shows choreographer Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick) venting to a mystery person over Zoom about the rat he found in his apartment. “It just sat there, staring at me, like a challenge. I’ve never felt so threatened in my life, even though he never moved,” he explains. “I mean, I’ve seen many rats in New York, but they’re different. They scurry away because they’re New Yorkers — they’ve got places to be. But this rat had nowhere to be except my apartment.” After Tobias realizes how long he’s been ranting, the camera pans to reveal Byrne on the choreographer’s laptop screen.
“I loved Piece 1, and I was kind of thinking maybe we could collaborate or something,” Byrne told an unimpressed Tobias, who replied, “I know you did that thing on Broadway. I didn’t see it… Have you done anything else?” (Byrne? More like burn!) A bit taken aback, Byrne brought up his popular band, Talking Heads, but still, Tobias remained un-phased. In fact, he whipped out his phone and searched “Talking Heads” to learn more, which Byrne called him out on. Tobias smashed play on the band’s 80s hit, “Once In a Lifetime” — which later accompanies the episode’s end credits — and Byrne’s iconic Étoile cameo concluded in under a minute.
Eager to know how exactly it all went down, Decider asked Étoile‘s cast and creators about their major guest star. Here’s what they had to say.
“We thought of the bit. In our world, we say ‘The perfect person would be David Byrne.’ So let’s say you reveal that [Tobias] is talking to David Byrne and then he doesn’t know Talking Heads. Often what happens is that you can’t get David Byrne, and you go down a list of people you can get. And some of those people are very good, too,” Daniel Palladino told Decider over Zoom. “And you get David Byrne’s gardener!” Amy Sherman-Palladino joked. “His gardener’s excellent.”
“We had no connection to him. We wrote a letter. I’ve been a fan. I bought the first Talking Heads album, that’s how old I am, when it first came out,” Palladino continued. “We’ve seen all his Broadway stuff. We’re just gigantic fans of his. And we wrote a letter, we told him we’re shooting it in New York City, we told him he could ride his bike to the set, and he said yes.”
Gilmore Girls fans may even recall a David Byrne/Talking Heads reference in Season 5, Episode 7, “You Jump, I Jump, Jack.”
On the day of Byrne’s Étoile cameo, he rode his bike the the Brooklyn Library and the cast was admittedly starstruck. “I was just off camera, marveling at the fact. I used to listen to Talking Heads every day. I did not tell him that. But he’s cool, and he’s just like what you think he is,” Gideon Glick told Decider. “I said hi to him at the Brooklyn Library, and it was one of the more exciting moments of my day and life,” Luke Kirby added.
Gideon said that after seeing Byrne on a Zoom call from his apartment, the Étoile team recreated his background as a set in the Brooklyn Library basement, which admittedly “weirded out” the singer. “That’s his Zoom room!” Sherman-Palladino proudly confirmed. “He was a little freaked out. It felt a little stalker-y to him, but we did it anyhow.”
“He was saying, ‘That painting that you have on the wall, I actually bought the one I have on tour with the Talking Heads,'” Palladino added. “And he remembered exactly where he had bought it.”
While Byrne is a huge get, he’s not the only musical cameo in Étoile. And as Gilmore fans know, he’s not the first singer to appear in a Palladino series, either. “We had Carole King on Gilmore Girls and we got it because we asked her. She had already said she’d do the theme song and we were like, ‘I wonder if Carole King wants to play this role. She probably won’t, but let’s see,'” Palladino recalled, referencing King’s time as music store owner Sophie Bloom. “She was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve never acted. But, sure. I wanna do that.’ And then we made great had great times with Carole King.”
The big takeaway? “Sometimes really famous people are just sitting there waiting for someone to ask them to do something that’s different from what they normally do,” Palladino said.
Étoile Season 1 is now streaming on Prime Video.