Lupin Part 4: Omar Sy on playing a French superhero

In Arabic, there is no letter “P”, so whenever French actor Omar Sy is in the Middle East, people tell him how much they love him in “Lubin”, rather than Lupin.

“When I travel the world, you see so many people from all over talking about Lupin, but it’s very interesting that every country has its own pronunciation for Lupin,” Sy told The Nightly.

Since it premiered in January 2021, Lupin has become a wildly popular show across many markets, including in Australia. On the Netflix charts, the first two seasons are still in the all-time top 10 for non-English language series.

And why wouldn’t it be?

It’s a cross-genre delight, a pacy heist thriller and family drama known for its clever and intricate reveals, anchored by a charismatic performance from Sy, who before this was best known to international audiences for the beloved French comedy-drama The Intouchables.

The success of the show has supercharged Sy’s career, and found himself able to secure financing for smaller projects that were struggling before Lupin, such as Father & Soldier, a war drama about Senegalese soldiers in the French Army during WWI.

Lupin was inspired by century-old books by Maurice Leblanc about a character named Arsene Lupin, a quintessential gentlemen thief who uses smarts and charm rather than crass violence for his schemes.

Sy’s character is Assane Diop, a French man of Senegalese heritage who devoured Leblanc’s books as a child, and as an adult, concocts an alter ego as a modern-day Lupin to pull off, in the first season, a bold jewellery heist from the Louvre.

But Assane is not driven by greed, his motivations are far more complicated than that. His father, Babakar, worked for a very wealthy French family and was framed by them decades earlier.

What Assane really wants is justice, and he appropriates an iconic fictional persona – rich and white - that is usually not accessible to people with his background. As himself, as Assane, he couldn’t possibly capture the public’s imagination with his daring plots, but as Lupin he could.

Assane also thinks it insulates his actions, at least a little, from his family, which includes a son and an ex-wife.

“Assane was broken by his family because of his dad, so being a dad for him is very complicated because his relationship with his dad was tricky,” Sy explained.

“So that’s where he’s a little bit weak, and then at the same time, he created his persona, Lupin. This is where there’s always been conflict, and for him, it’s how he can be Assane and Lupin in good balance, having them living together inside him because that’s the two sides of him.”

This fourth season, which premieres this week, Assane will meet an adversary who might be his biggest rival yet because he is battling himself, sort of.

There’s a four-year time-jump, during which Assane has been in prison. Days before his release, a figure pretending to be Lupin promises to pull off two simultaneous, impossible heists in two different cities. It’s an imposter who’s calling him out to play.

Setting up a proper challenge to Assane was the heart of the conversation for the filmmakers and Sy before they agreed to another season.

“What can we do this season, can we go back and find a new story to tell, a new situation for Assane,” Sy recalled. “How can we challenge him outside his family story? He’s very vulnerable when he talks about his feelings for his wife, his son, his dad, but when he’s Lupin, he’s invincible.

“He’s faster and smarter than anyone, so the best way to challenge him is to have another him. What happens if you have another Lupin, someone who uses the same tools, the same method?”

There’s another word for invincible, at least in storytelling: superhero. It’s a term Sy also used to describe Lupin.

Assane might not have been injected with any super serums or been blasted by space energy, nor is he a billionaire playboy with unlimited resources to create his own Batcave, but he is a superhero in every other way.

He just uses theatrical make-up, costumes, misdirection and his understanding of human nature to pull off eye-popping heists that always serves a different purpose, usually to expose corruption or injustice.

The series often positions him as a superhero, to the point he is literally running across rooftops against the backdrop of Paris, Eiffel Tower and all, with his coat billowing behind him like a cape.

For Sy, who was born and raised in the suburbs of Paris and whose parents came from Senegal and Mauritania, the point was to present Assane as a superhero.

“We wanted to have a French superhero, first thing, and, of course, to have a Black superhero, that was very important to me,” he said. “It’s very important for kids.

“We wanted to show a different face of France to the outside world, and that’s why we’re so proud and happy to see Lupin be so successful internationally because we can show that France is diverse.”

Lupin Part 4 is on Netflix from October 23