‘She’s a Tonic,’ Says Sarah Lancashire of Her Groundbreaking Title Character in HBO Max’s JULIA

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede Early in the new HBO Max series JULIA, it becomes very clear what Julia Child was up against as she took the first tiny steps toward becoming a TV legend. Played by Sarah Lancashire, the Julia character has to convince just about everyone about the viability of – gasp – a cooking show, which seemed impossibly lowbrow at the time, especially to the purveyors of public television. It was the early 1960s, and even Julia’s generally supportive retired-diplomat husband Paul, played by David Hyde Pierce, wasn’t sure that television was going to last. “Maybe TV’s not a fad,” Julia supposes to Paul. “Good lord,” replies Paul. “It has to be.” Inspired by Julia’s extraordinary life and her long-running television series THE FRENCH CHEF, JULIA debuts Thursday, March 31, with the first three episodes dropping only on Crave. The series explores an evolving time in American history, encompassing the nature of celebrity, the emergence of feminism, and how even loving marriages had to navigate shifting power dynamics. And in the middle of it all was Julia Child, an American who fell in love with French cuisine, cooking up a storm. “There’s such an awful lot of source material available online, so that was a starting point to reference her, plus reading the books about her,” said Lancashire during a virtual panel interview. “But at some point for me, I actually put the written material away, because it didn’t necessarily make sense with what we were trying to do, which was a drama, as opposed to a documentary.” Child’s distinctive voice – kind of a high-pitched lilting yodel that comedians had fun with for years – was something that Lancashire had to wrap her brain around. “I worked with a vocal coach for a very short period of time – we were looking at accent, really – and then I pulled away from that and started trying to create a parallel voice with the essence of her vocal eccentricity and her singularity, but harmonized with the physical,” Lancashire explained. “I’m not a mimic. I can’t impersonate. And she had this extraordinarily complex vocal range, which I don’t share with her. So I had to find something which worked in parallel and was comfortable.” As for the more general essence of Julia Child, Lancashire added, “I spent many, many hours just watching her. But that’s not a hardship. She’s a joy to watch. You kind of want to be in her company and, yeah, she makes you feel better about the world, really. She’s a tonic.” Of course, the Julia Child story has been told before, most memorably in the 2009 movie Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep. Lancashire was asked if that film played into her preparation, or if she felt she was better off to ignore it. “For me, it’s quite simple – it’s a completely different project and the nature of the project is different, the tone of the project is different,” Lancashire said. “You do 50 different Hamlets, you do 50 different actors, they’ll all be different. And so it didn’t really occur to me. The benefit from the film, for me, was that it was the first time I’d ever heard of Julia, because she did not have a presence in the U.K. So the marketing around the film was the first time that I became aware of her. But other than that, it didn’t really play any part in my preparation for this piece at all.” According to Pierce, no matter how many portrayals and evaluations of Julia Child exist, there is just something about her that is eternal and shines through. “I think she’s one of a kind, and I think that’s why people have stayed interested in her throughout changing fashions, and styles, and foods, and everything else, and why so many different versions of her have occurred,” he said. “She’s eternally fascinating.” Bon appétit! billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv