“Something crazy happened to me the other day,” Lucas Bravo says as he sits al fresco at Swingers, the diner that’s a longtime staple along Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood, on a sticky August day.

He explains it was about 5 a.m. and he was jetlagged after traveling to L.A. from Paris, where he lives, to promote the new season of “Emily in Paris.” Unable to sleep, Bravo linked up with a friend and drove to a beach, where he was approached with an unusual request.

“As we park, a Range Rover pulls up and this woman is like, ‘Hey, are you doing anything?’” Bravo recalls. “She was like, ‘Listen, if you have 10 minutes, I’ll give you money so you can serve someone [legal papers]. Basically, it’s for custody of my kids; I’m in the middle of a divorce and these are papers to serve to my mother-in-law.’”

“I’m a people pleaser,” he continues, “so I’m like, how do I get out of this? And I’m an Aries, so I jump in the pool and then I learn how to swim. But, also, I mean, I don’t want to serve a grandmother. My friend got me out of it. But what if I was alone? I probably would have done it.”

This is what it’s like, getting lost in the tales of a French guy who’s in Los Angeles. But, for the record, his alter ego may still have the edge on experiencing surprising and dramatic life moments.

Netflix’s frothy series began as a fish-out-of-water story about a bright-eyed American marketing executive living in Paris, and Bravo eventually emerged as the show’s swoon-worthy leading man playing Gabriel, the chef with a heart of gold who ends up in a divisive love triangle with Emily (Lily Collins). Being a show that comes from the mind of Darren Star, a master at crafting messy relationships, it was only a matter of time before things got très compliqué.

Lily Collins as Emily with Lucas Bravo as Gabriel in an episode from the fourth season of “Emily in Paris.”
(Stephanie Branchu / Netflix)

After getting his professional life on track — opening a restaurant and devoting himself to earning a Michelin star — Gabriel’s personal life goes off the rails when his last-minute wedding to on-again, off-again girlfriend Camille (Camille Razat) is called off because of his feelings for Emily. But wait, Camille is pregnant? Not so fast. Part 1 of the fourth season, which was released last month, finally saw Gabriel and Emily rekindle their romance just as his chance at a coveted Michelin star implodes. And Camille? Well, it turns out she isn’t pregnant after all — but she’s withholding the news from Gabriel.

Bravo is coy about the second half of the season, now streaming, offering chuckles that signal his character’s roller-coaster journey is bracing for another drop. “Darren knows how to bring the chaos,” he says.

Still, even Bravo was surprised by recent story developments, particularly Camille’s pregnancy. “I was like, ‘Wow, it’s a big shift. This might be my cue,’” he says, jokingly implying the uncertain fate he thought it held for his character. But Bravo came into the fourth season appreciating the relief his character would get from the scrapped wedding and the other curve balls that knocked Gabriel off course.

“I’m a simple person,” he says. “I don’t think I can handle that pressure on a daily basis. [Gabriel’s] the same. So, there’s this big, big, big relief. I don’t know how he’s gonna take the baby news because he seems very pumped, to say the least.”

The notion of being freed from expectations is something Bravo knows well. It’s what’s brought us to Swingers — and why this story isn’t about a lawyer.

At 18, after his first semester at law school, he joined a friend for a quick getaway to L.A. He crashed at the West Hollywood home of a friend’s father, the filmmaker Jean-Christophe “Pitof” Comar, director of 2003’s “Catwoman.” His “first taste of America,” as he tells it, involved spending much of that week on a loop, walking to the Grove, L.A.’s outdoor shopping hub, and grabbing a Red Bull and a pack of Parliament cigarettes.

Unable to afford a taxi on his last day in town, he asked his friends to give him a ride to the airport. They declined as a tactic to get him to stay. He did, for five years.

Just Lucas in Los Angeles.

“I was pursuing myself; I was trying to land into myself and understand myself,” he says. Sitting across from Bravo, there’s a sense that he’s still on that path. He’s contemplative and slightly self-conscious as he talks about himself, and measured when he reveals intimacies like how, growing up, he just wanted to make friends “to gather love” because his parents didn’t verbalize it a lot. (He’s careful to note he has a good relationship with them.)

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1. “Emily in Paris” star Lucas Bravo. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

He dropped out of law school. His parents stopped talking to him during that time. He couldn’t work because he didn’t have a visa. But he had a roof over his head. And he’d bum cash off of friends to survive when the funds his grandmother occasionally sent ran low.

“Every day, I would ask a different friend for a couple of bucks and go to Taco Bell and get the 99 cent cheesy double beef burrito,” he says. “And Swingers — I haven’t been here in a long time — but it was a quick walk from the house. My friends and I would sit in a booth and they would order stuff and I would look at it, like, ‘that looks good.’ And my friends would be like, ‘order a Coke, order a burger.’ So, Swingers, for me, represented friendship and generosity and the biggest meals I had for the first three years after having nothing.”

There was some romance, too. He shares a story of the time he walked from West Hollywood to Pacific Palisades — about a 16-mile journey — for a date: “It took me six hours,” he says. “At some point, there are no sidewalks. You feel like you’re gonna die. She opened the door, and she was like, ‘You’re late. ‘Gossip Girl’ started already.’”

Contrary to the cliche, he wasn’t bitten by the acting bug while he was here. He didn’t act at all in that time. But being the son of a professional soccer player (Daniel Bravo), and moving every few years, unlocked the performer in him at an early age, he says.

“With every new school, I had the ‘new guy’ status,” he says. “Subconsciously, I think it was a defense mechanism. I started really being very perceptive about group dynamics and patterns of people. I would know exactly the beat to fit into and lose the ‘new guy’ status as fast as possible.”

So when Bravo’s mother enrolled him in acting school at 15, he felt there was something safe about a script. “It felt like a blueprint for a human being — here is how to be, how to talk, how to think,” he says.

For Bravo, going to law school felt like the “normal” track to be on — one that his brother pursued. It also seemed that being a lawyer required a certain amount of performance to get a jury on your side. (And it’s why being asked to serve legal papers felt like a jolt to the senses.) But once he returned home, he enrolled in a more formal acting school, working in restaurants and supermarkets along the way.