A heartwarming performance in a dance-driven commercial about pandemic perseverance first brought Taïs Vinolo to the attention of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino as they were casting for their television series about ballet dancers, “Étoile.” In 2023 Vinolo was taking time off from dancing with National Ballet of Canada due to injury when the “Étoile” casting director reached out to her. She auditioned for the leading role of Mishi, a young dancer caught between familial duty and adolescent desire, just as NBoC offered to renew Vinolo’s contract. When she was offered the role, Vinolo accepted with the support of her colleagues and NBoC’s artistic director. “They always pushed me to be creative and feed myself as an artist for ballet,” she says.
From the stage to the screen, Vinolo dances with airy elegance, her long limbs moving through space with understated precision. Born in France, Vinolo trained at American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School throughout her teens and spent a year dancing at Boston Ballet’s graduate program. After that, she danced with NBoC before embarking on her acting career as Mishi.
Mishi as a Mirror
“You can really see how Mishi evolves and how she grows up. How can she become a better artist, and how can she become a better young woman? It was really great, this parallel. It was interesting for me to play this character arc as I started acting and then I got more confident.”
The Power of Representation
“I want ballet to be more accessible to different people. There is this image of ballet that’s very traditional, and a lot of young people weren’t interested. Now, through social media and TikTok, a lot of people love ballet —it’s even a trend with this ‘balletcore’ thing. I want to be able to be a voice for ballet. Something that’s really important to me is to be a good representation for the Black community as a Black ballerina.”
Photo by Jim Browsky, Courtesy Vinolo.
Merging Two Passions
“I needed to act on ‘Étoile,’ but I also needed to dance. Combining everything was very hard. On days off, I was going to ballet class, and on the weekend I was working with my acting and dialect coach. It was six months of intensive work every day. (I feel completely different) as a person in my life, as an artist, also now as an actor.”
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