“Everyone loves an origin story,” showrunner and executive producer Chris Keyser said about Julia, an HBO Max original series about the rise of television personality Julia Child and her hit series The French Chef. “If it’s X-Men or food on television, there’s something about watching those first moments of discovery.” During a TCA press conference, the creative team was joined by the cast to talk about bringing a pop-culture icon back to the big screen. “We were in this weird position of being a first-year show about a first-year show and constantly trying to put aside our expectations of what we might become because we understood that when the people at WGBH made The French Chef, they had no expectations whatsoever. The technology was simple. The techniques were simple. The view of the scope of it was relatively simple, although I think Paul [Child] and Julia [Child] did hope that it would reach people. But, generally, there was a kind of innocence to it that we miss now, and innocence also has a kind of special power.”
(Seacia Pavao / HBO Max)
“My favorite recipe was her favorite recipe, which was the sole meunière,” actress Sarah Lancashire revealed, who plays Julia Child. “I spent many, many hours just watching her. There’s so much source material available and really that’s what I was doing. But that’s not a hardship. She’s a joy to watch. You kind of want to be in her company and she makes you feel better about the world, really. She’s a tonic.” In addition to watching countless hours of footage and reading books and letters, Sarah Lancashire worked with a vocal coach to capture the icon’s persona. “I pulled away from that and started looking at trying to create a parallel voice, really, that would essentially create the essence of her vocal eccentricity and her singularity but was harmonized with the physical. And that’s important to find a place which is comfortable. And that’s just a matter of time, really, of playing around and trying to find something which works. I’m not a mimic. I can’t impersonate. And also, she did have this extraordinarily complex vocal change, which I don’t share with her. And, therefore, that unfortunately wasn’t an in for me. I had to find something which worked in parallel and was comfortable.”
There’s an outdated phrase that behind every great man is a great woman. It’s a little sexist, but a true pioneer of her time, behind this great woman was a great man, Paul Child. “I am such a huge admirer of Paul Child, the man, and getting the chance to learn about him – the less famous of the pair – how accomplished he was in so many areas,” David Hyde Pierce explained about portraying Julia Child’s husband. “He played the violin. He was a black belt in Judo. He built furniture. He did all these things, and had a career as a diplomat, and also had this amazing love affair with this amazing woman. It’s not speaking of the sort of unexplored. It’s nice, and also I feel a great responsibility, to have his life in my hands, in our hands, to try to honestly convey to people just how singular he was, and how great, and what a unique and iconic partnership this was – including the conflict, which we don’t know about in the public life, because that’s the part that’s not written about. But, of course, any great, true relationship is tested by conflict.”
“You don’t get to hear a lot about Black producers at this time, which they were around, I just want to say,” Brittany Bradford said about why she was excited to play Alice Naman. “Sometimes you want to think that something that’s improbable is impossible, but it’s not. And so getting a chance to learn about who Alice could have been and the Alices of the world and then getting an opportunity to interact with Julia, and they’re two women that are going through life and working in completely different ways but they are complementary towards one another… There are moments where they interact and those are some of my favorites getting to play with Sarah and learn from her as well.”
“Judith Jones, her body of work before she comes to the cookbooks, is extraordinary,” gushed actress Fiona Glascott about her role, playing the editor who helped The Diary of Anne Frank get published. “The amount of serious, heavy-hitting literary works that she has done and at the time was looking for – without even realizing it, she was looking for a way of French food particularly to be taught in America and cooked at home. And then when this manuscript fell on her desk, it’s like worlds collided. And she also is an extraordinarily generous woman who was really interested in bringing people together and elevating them. And I think, not only did she fall in love with Julia’s work, but she fell in love with her. I mean, who couldn’t? And so together they started to elevate each other. Julia was an answer for Judith’s wishes for years. They found each other and then Julia brought Judith again into this world of cookbooks. Judith always being a huge fan of food and cooking, then ended up years later writing her own cookbooks, which I think was hugely owed to Julia, and these women coming together and finding each other and then gathering more around them.”
Playing another editor who helped Julia Child bring French cuisine to the masses is Bebe Neuwirth as Avis DeVoto, who recalled her first memories of watching The French Chef. “I was a little kid when [Julia Child] was on and even if you were a little kid and you didn’t know anything about her life, this is a fascinating person to watch. She was goofy. She was brilliant. She was profound. She was funny-looking, but she was also beautiful. And she did these incredible things and then fed you. It was sort of like quicksilver. She’s sort of like everything, very multifaceted, like you can’t not look at her and say what is going on there? At least, as I say, from a kid’s perspective watching TV and we all are kids watching TV. That's in all of us, that element.”
“I saw her as an artist,” acto Fran Kranz shared of something he learned about Julia Child while making the show, portraying producer/director Russ Morash. “And great artists are eternal. They stick around. We pay attention to them for years and years, centuries. There was an artist inside of her and I really love that… That joie de vivre is contagious. It’s infectious. And you got it being around her or watching her.”
The first three episodes of Julia are now streaming on HBO Max, with new episodes releasing on Thursdays.