There’s a moment early in the first season of “Emily in Paris,” Netflix’s colorful fish-out-of-water comedy about a bright-eyed American marketing executive abroad, when our protagonist’s frosty, intimidating, effortlessly chic Parisian boss, Sylvie Grateau, called out the heroine’s cliched behavior — and arguably established herself as the show’s most interesting character.

“You come to Paris, you walk into my office and you don’t even bother to learn the language,” Sylvie, played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, says to Emily. “You treat the city like it’s your amusement park. And after a year of food, sex, wine and maybe some culture, you’ll go back to where you came from.”

Sylvie is definitely not always the boss you want to have, but with Leroy-Beaulieu’s finesse, the layers underneath her cool facade have made her a compelling, if somewhat inscrutable, antagonist. Armed with a raised eyebrow of judgment that can single-handedly deflate American cheerfulness, Sylvie struts around Paris in slitted skirts, plunging necklines and sky-high heels, embodying the sophistication and blase elegance of the ultimate Frenchwoman. She is feared and revered — but she is good at her job without losing her identity to it.

Sylvie, not Emily, is the character we wish we had the audacity to be.

And she comes into focus like never before in the show’s third season, now on Netflix. The series left off with Sylvie unexpectedly resigning, along with faithful employees Luc and Julian, after clashing with her superior at Savoir, a prestigious French marketing firm bought by an American conglomerate. The new season follows Sylvie as she sets out to open her own luxury marketing firm, Agence Grateau.

As Leroy-Beaulieu explained from New York in a recent video call, she appreciated the development for its willingness to show the power of a woman of a certain age, and at a certain stage in her career, being unafraid to take risks. She was in that position herself when she auditioned for the role, originally written to be between 35 and 40 years old.

“It’s very empowering to play somebody like Sylvie,” she says, “because it’s a fantastic exploration of your own courage, of your own stubbornness, of your own faith and life. Playing Sylvie really made me realize that I had some aspects of my personality I didn’t know I had, and it gave me much more confidence. I also saw my demons much more — I love shadow work, that’s something I adore, and that’s super interesting, because you can use your demons much more if you can keep them on a leash. It’s really made me grow intimately a lot.”

Even before Leroy-Beaulieu, 59, slips into a slinky emerald green dress and blindingly bedazzled thigh-high boots for a photo shoot, she brings high style to our Zoom call with a red velvet suit jacket and a leopard-print scarf. She is surprisingly genial, given the artful aloofness she projects in the series, and when she smiles, it doesn’t feel like her eyes are throwing daggers. When the conversation turns to her own culture shock visiting the U.S., she says she found the loneliness of L.A. most striking, as well as our penchant for big warehouse stores.

Wait. Has she set foot inside a Costco?

“Yes, I have,” she says. “And I don’t like it at all. There’s no story. I just went in and went, ‘Oh my God, where am I?’ Even in France, I don’t like supermarkets.”

With her fan-favorite turn in “Emily in Paris,” Leroy-Beaulieu is one of the most recognizable French actors of the moment. She even had a small role earlier this year in Netflix’s Emmy winner “The Crown,” playing Monique Ritz, widow of hotelier Charles Ritz.

“I couldn’t believe that they offered me that,” she says. “It’s a really small part, but it’s such an honor and it was such a great scene. Peter Morgan, to me, is sort of modern Shakespeare. And when you’re on that set, you feel like you’re a little piece of something much bigger than you.”

It’s quite the career turnaround for an actor who was never all that concerned with achieving international fame.

Leroy-Beaulieu made her acting debut in Roger Vadim’s film “Surprise Party” in 1983 and a few years later earned a Cesar nomination for most promising actress with her role as a single mother in the comedy “Trois Hommes et un Couffin,” a runaway hit in France that would eventually be remade in America as “Three Men and a Baby.” The majority of her career has been in France, where she has performed in a string of films and TV shows, but she was virtually unknown in the U.S. until recently. In particular, the actor credits “Call My Agent,” the popular comedy (streaming in the U.S. on Netflix) about film industry agents struggling to keep their business afloat and clients happy, with breathing new life into her career after it launched in 2015. In it, she features as Catherine Barneville, the scorned wife of the firm’s most senior agent, whose extramarital affairs prompt the breakdown of their marriage.