“I live and breathe it and I love it, but it doesn’t define me,” Laviscount says. “There are so many things that make up Lucien. It’s very important for me to navigate and survive the actor’s life.”
He does that by keeping fit — kickboxing, Muay Thai, recently Brazilian jiu jitsu. He lifts weights and stretches and hits the golf course. Yoga and running aren’t his jam, but he’s trying. “Fitness is all mental for me — everything is to feed the mental,” Laviscount says. He invokes the lessons of the movie Thor. “I always want to be prepared for what the end of the world might look like, or what any other job might look like.”
Laviscount realizes he gives off an all-work-and-no-play vibe. (When he told me that he didn’t care about food that much and would be happy taking a tablet in the morning instead of eating all day, I thought wistfully of all the croissant au beurre and chaussons aux pommes he was missing out on.) But he swears he can put it into neutral.
“My release is definitely keeping my head straight on,” Laviscount says. “I love to dance, I love to have a good time, I love to be around people who know so much more than me. All my friends are really intelligent, and we will just sit there and someone will just drop a poem out of nowhere, someone will just spit a few bars, someone will sing a song, someone’ll start talking about some philosopher they’ve been reading about. And to just be around them kinda people, that’s my release. I guess learning is my best release.”
He seems to be getting some of that on the Emily set, too. He gushes about his co-stars, the writers and the crew. The show’s got a fourth season in the pipeline, but it’s prudent to think ahead. These types of shows don’t go on forever. Gossip Girl went six seasons, but that was a decade ago. Bridgerton is heading into season three sometime next year and going strong, and erudite rom-coms Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin topped out at four and five seasons, respectively.
