This was Lou de Laâge's first role in English (though she also speaks her native French in many scenes).
Because the scripts are written in English and the French parts need to be translated, the creators went through several translators until finding the right one for their particular way of writing dialogue. Charlotte Gainsbourg, a huge fan of their work, helped them in the process.
David Alvarez plays Gael Rodriguez, a dancer who is convinced to come back to ballet after a hiatus from dance. This mirrors Alvarez's own career path. As a child, he received a full scholarship to train at New York's prestigious American Ballet Theatre. During that period, he was also one of three boys who rotated performances of the title role in the Broadway production of Billy Elliot the Musical; all three received a joint Tony Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical. However, after Billy Elliot ended and Alvarez graduated from high school, he left show business entirely and enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving for two and a half years as a sniper with the 25th Infantry Division. He returned to the stage as a swing / chorus member in the 2015 revival of On the Town and a Mexican production of Billy Elliot, and then left acting again, enrolling as an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Then he won the role of Bernardo in Steven Spielberg's movie of West Side Story (2021), and once again returned to dancing and performance.
Though Lou de Laâge (Cheyenne) had some dance training in her childhood, she is not a professional-level ballet dancer. So, as she told Esther Zuckerman in a May 2025 interview for Backstage Magazine, "When I act, it's only me. But when I dance, it's my double, Constance Devernay-Laurence [who also plays the onscreen role of Melanie], so I have to watch her and steal everything I can from her. It's her way of dancing that I need to learn. I had to take from the best, and she was better than me."
Jack (Luke Kirby) is opposed to taking funding from and naming a ballet theater after Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow), because he is a weapons and oil tycoon whose politics sharply differ from Jack's. Shamblee's character is a clear reference to the oil and gas magnate David H. Koch (1940-2019), one of the primary benefactors of the New York City Ballet and the namesake of its David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. Like Shamblee, Koch was an enthusiastic fan and supporter of ballet, but Koch was also a major promulgator of false conspiracy theories targeting Democratic candidates and politicians (most notably Barack Obama), and he spent more than $100 million in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to keep Obama from being reelected in 2012.