”People were like, ‘Hey, pick Florence. She’s here.’ And that’s basically how I got into the whole acting thing.” Pretty soon after meeting the producer, Faivre became the host of two youth-oriented shows on Thai television — Teentalk and E for Teens — running the gamut of health, beauty, fashion, film, and music. She was a natural on camera, but felt shaky as a Thai speaker and would repeat her lines obsessively before every shot to make sure she didn’t screw up. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t long before she was a highly sought-after model, popping up in magazines and on runways, fielding film and TV offers, and trying to finish high school at the same time. When she finally made the transition into film, she played the lead in a fantastical, time-traveling Thai film called The Siam Renaissance, produced by the same team that made the original Bangkok Dangerous.
     For her first American film, The Elephant King, Faivre explains that it was, yet again, pure coincidence that dropped the role in her lap. The filmmakers had traveled all the way from New York to Thailand in an exhaustive attempt to cast the female lead, only to find what they were looking for on the cover of an Asian fashion magazine sitting on a desk in the casting office. One of the producers pointed at Faivre’s photo and asked, “What about her?” He was subsequently informed by a Thai producer that Faivre lived in New York, and so they flew back home to set up a meeting.
     Written and directed by Seth Grossman, who’d spent two years living in Chiang Mai (where the film takes place), The Elephant King starts off as an American story about a guy whose parents ask him to go to Thailand to bring back his brother, who has become the worst kind of ex-pat, stuck hopelessly in an endless spiral of denial and indulgence.