Joffrey Ballet dancer gets star turn in 'Etoile,' a new series from 'Gilmore Girls' creators

The new scripted dance dramedy "Étoile" arrives in full this week on Amazon Prime Video, complete with a Chicago dancer as part of an ensemble pulled from some of the country’s top ballet companies.

Reed Henry, who appears in the ensemble of professional dancers, is in his second year as a company member at Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet.

The 20-year-old New Jersey native spent four months last year away from Joffrey’s State Street studios to join Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel Palladino’s latest TV venture. The duo are known for their quick-witted characters in projects like "Gilmore Girls" and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel."

While "Étoile" (“star” in French) is fictitious, the show draws its plot from the struggles facing real-world performing arts organizations. In one scene, the dialogue quickly captures the myriad complex, thorny headaches arts administrators face in 2025: the blow of COVID-19 to culture groups, declining audiences and an aging donor base. The show also draws from themes familiar to any performing arts entity, such as fighting with unions representing dancers and speculation that up-and-coming young talents would rather be famous on TikTok than part of a classical ballet company.

Henry hopes the show motivates viewers to seek out a live performance.

“I think it’s going to be really great for the ballet world,” he said before a recent screening of the show’s first two episodes at Streeterville’s AMC theater. “Right now especially, I think we need to support the arts, and I think a mainstream ballet TV show is what it needs.”

“They’ve always supported me in doing the show, which I know is hard … I was gone for four months,” Reed said of his Joffrey colleagues and bosses. “But they've been really supportive and very excited for me.”

"Étoile" features appearances from actors well-known in the Amy Sherman-Palladino universe, such as Luke Kirby ("The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel") and Yanic Truesdale ("Gilmore Girls"), plus real-world dance stars Tiler Peck and Robbie Fairchild (who have both had dominant careers at the New York City Ballet).

In the show, leaders of ballet companies in New York and Paris decide to go big and swap their biggest stars for at least a year, hoping the stunt is enough to drum up media attention and ticket sales. It comes with the fate of their companies — and maybe even ballet writ large — on the line, as the executives face mounting pressure from board members and donors: Bring back audiences or else! But even in this fictitious universe, a winning strategy may require accepting money from a morally bankrupt megarich superfan.

The show, in many ways, feels like the dance equivalent of the 2014 Amazon Prime show "Mozart in the Jungle," which chronicled the struggles and triumphs of a fictitious New York City symphony orchestra.

Henry said he wanted to be in "Étoile" because he thinks ballet dancers get a bad rap.

“I feel like there’s such a stigma about ballet dancers, and I wanted to see if ballet could become, pardon my French, but less stick - - the - - -," Henry said. “I just want people to know that ballet dancers are people.”

The opportunity came via his manager, who asked if he wanted to submit a short audition tape of him dancing. “And then just one thing led to another, and then I was a dancer on a TV show,” Henry said.

The production shot last year at a Brooklyn studio and on-site locations, like Lincoln Center, home to the real-world New York City Ballet.

Even for a ballet dancer who is no stranger to grueling schedules, Henry said the experience was intense, with early call times and long days. In the end, he’s grateful for Sherman-Palladino and her exacting vision for what appears on screen. (Sherman-Palladino was raised by a mother who was a dancer and herself danced into her adult life.)

“I feel like with Amy, knowing about ballet, she wouldn’t put a bad take in her show, so we would keep doing the takes,” Henry said. “I really appreciate that, because in a performance, it’s [a] one-time thing. If it goes wrong, you’ll do it tomorrow again. But if it's on TV, it’s there. So, that was kind of a scary thing for me going into the show, but the way that they handled it was flawless.”

And Henry said that effort is well-represented on screen.

“There’s a great amount of dancing. Like, there’s so much dancing. It’s really exciting,” he said.

All eight episodes of "Etoile" are now streaming on Prime Video.