‘Emily in Paris’ season 4 is now streaming on Netflix

Lucas Bravo, now known for his role in Emily in Paris, revealed that before landing the part, he retreated to the mountains after an early rejection.

In an exclusive conversation with PEOPLE, the actor who portrays Gabriel in the Netflix series said he wasn’t originally chosen to play the French chef.

Over many months, Bravo underwent five auditions but was not selected for the part.

He said that because he lacked “enough background,” Paramount, the parent company of MTV Entertainment Studios, “wanted to take a chance on” him.

This led to his short-lived retreat to the island in the Mediterranean. “I wanted to be in a place where there’s no service, and I could just talk to birds, so to speak,” he stated.

Bravo shared, “A hiker came by and he was like, ‘Can I borrow your phone? I really need to call my daughter’,” adding that the only mobile service available is on top of a large rock, roughly a 40-minute hike away.

“I gave him my phone, he left, never came back,” he continued.

“He told me, ‘Your phone was vibrating left and right when I got service, so you should check it out.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no. I’m here to forget this Emily Paris thing,’ ” Bravo added..

“And in the morning, I woke up like, ‘I should take a look at it,’ ” he recalls, before revealing he discovered he had 40 messages and 30 missed calls. “It was the casting director telling me, ‘Where are you?’ ”

After he quickly left and went to Paris, he heard that “the official Gabriel had signed his contract, did a table read, [and] was about to start,” but he had no idea what was going on. Then he found out that he was going to read for Emily’s other suitors.

He notes that it was “a bit harsh” because it was “still an open wound” that he had to recite Gabriel’s lines during auditions for other parts. He did as requested and continued with the chemistry read in front of two Paramount producers, two writers, the director, creator Darren Star, and Lily Collins.