The first time David Hyde Pierce watched Sarah Lancashire play Julia Child, she prepared him a meal. The cameras rolled as she cracked eggs in both hands at once. She turned an omelet over with one flip, then slid it onto a plate without a utensil in sight. She garnished the dish with parsley as if it were her millionth try. Director Charles McDougall yelled “cut!” with Pierce sitting across from her, and he said aloud, if only to himself, “Oh, my.” He had chills. “She transformed in front of his eyes. He felt her greatness,” Julia creator Daniel Goldfarb recalls. As Pierce puts it now, “It was like she’d been doing it all her life.”
It’s but one scene of many that showcases a singular embodiment of a larger-than-life American icon. HBO Max’s sweetly comic Julia examines its eponymous heroine’s second act of celebrity as a budding television personality, having just introduced French cooking to the American masses via her groundbreaking cookbook. The story of her finding fame as a buoyant middle-aged woman in sexist ’60s America—and in a loving but power-shifting marriage to retired diplomat Paul (played by Pierce)—makes for a unique portrait that stands apart from prior depictions.
Lancashire’s powerhouse performance marks both a staggering change of pace for the actor and a long time coming. Prior to taking on the role, the British acting treasure, known for award-winning work onstage (Guys and Dolls, Betty Blue Eyes) and screen (Last Tango in Halifax, Happy Valley), had somehow avoided working in the U.S. entirely over a 35-year career, despite plenty of offers. No project could lure Lancashire away from stable family life, or the rich range of characters her country happily kept her busy with. Crossing the Atlantic required a challenge that she really, truly couldn’t take on at home.
Lancashire had little awareness of Julia Child, outside of marketing for 2009’s Julie & Julia (which starred Meryl Streep in an Oscar-nominated turn). At the end of 2019, she told her agent she wanted to take a year off of acting for personal reasons. Days later, he called her, respectful of her decision but with a pilot script that he wanted her to read anyway, called Julia. She obliged, with no idea it was about Child; given her lack of familiarity, she read over a dozen pages before figuring that part out. She loved the writing, in any case, and put her hiatus on hiatus, flying to Los Angeles for auditions. She hadn’t auditioned in decades—“This is not grandiosity; I never got the job as a young actor because I was so hopeless in auditioning,” she tells me with a chuckle—and didn’t expect to get the role. She brought her youngest son along for the L.A. trip, making a little vacation out of it. “We flew home,” Lancashire says, “and I forgot about it.”
Little did Lancashire know that the project’s very survival had become dependent on her. Goldfarb and his team made extremely long lists of candidates to play Child (Joan Cusack was briefly attached but “that ended up not working out,” says showrunner Chris Keyser), and every single actor but one was ruled out. “The body language and the essence of [Child] is so masterfully conveyed by Sarah, and she moves back and forth between the pathos and the comedy with complete ease—I don’t know anyone else who could have done that,” Keyser says. “We and the network decided that it was either going to be Sarah, or the show wasn’t going to happen…. It was Sarah or nothing.”
Fortunately, Lancashire said yes. Her “year off” wasn’t meant to be—until, it kind of was. Three days into shooting in Boston, in March 2020, the set shut down due to the pandemic, and didn’t pick up again until September, when she filmed the pilot. Then, a COVID-19 surge delayed the rest of the season’s production schedule to spring. By the time Lancashire had returned to the U.S. to complete Julia in mid-2021, the world had changed: Save a two-week stretch, she couldn’t see her loved ones due to travel restrictions. “It’s not an experience I care to repeat, in terms of being isolated away from family,” Lancashire says. One of the most challenging roles of her career took on an entirely new layer of difficulty—though it was also rewarding. She could live, sleep, and breathe Julia Child as she’d never quite done with a character before.
“To be perfectly honest, I think I was slightly saved the first time we were closed down,” Lancashire says. “I don’t think I was ready.”
In character, Lancashire’s voice is vividly suggestive of Child’s iconic vocal joie de vivre, but never sinks into mimicry. She inhabits the commanding physicality—that kind, gregarious presence flowing from room to room. There’s a sharpness to the portrayal too: Lancashire is often most alive when saying nothing at all, absorbing and at times calculating, as anyone with the odds stacked against them must learn to do.
When Lancashire took on the role, Keyser says, “We had no direct evidence that she could do this…. It was mostly a relationship of trust and it could have failed. There’s no question about it.” Pierce found in the scenes he and Lancashire played together, that something crucial came naturally to her: “The thing Sarah most brings to the role is authority. Julia is lovely and whimsical and charming, and Sarah has all of that. But Julia didn’t get where she got by just being whimsical and charming. She knew what she wanted.”
Lancashire grew up with a mother who knew how to cook with flair, and imbued Julia’s kitchen scenes with that nostalgic quality of loving, homey memory. Beyond that, she tells me she fully immersed herself in her subject’s world, with a strict and relentless routine. She tried working with a voice coach before deciding to go at it on her own—she wanted spirit, not tricks—falling asleep to clips on her iPad of Child in action. She’d walk or sit by the Boston harbor with fresh scripts, reading them over and over. She spoke with old collaborators of Child’s around the greater Boston area, listening to personalized tales of the woman we all knew on TV but not off. (Certainly, Lancashire’s YouTube history attests she knew that version intimately.) “The immediate thing that you notice about her is what a free spirit she is. She’s in Technicolor, like a bird of paradise—she’s unlike anybody I’ve ever encountered before,” Lancashire says. “She’s pioneering. She’s a frontierswoman.”
A camera operator who worked on Child’s The French Chef told Lancashire that “Julia would walk into the studio and…just stand and watch and take everything in.” This was Lancashire’s point of fascination: the private, silent Julia who thrived in perseverance. One anecdote, particularly, unlocked something for the actor. “I was in a hotel for the first couple of weeks, and one of the managers came over to me and said, ‘I drove Julia home once,’” Lancashire recalls. “She’d been in the hotel at a function, I think she’d been the guest of honor. She’d entertained everybody wonderfully. He got the car ready and she climbed into the back. I said, ‘And what did she say?’ He said, ‘She said nothing. She exhaled very deeply, and then sat in silence for the entire journey home.’”
“There is no real documentary footage of the private Julia,” Goldfarb notes. “Sarah embodied that side of Julia in a way that felt really fresh and new.”
Lancashire is known for playing dark, gritty characters; her sheer brightness in Julia may play authentically for viewers, but it took her by surprise and required a new method of preparing: “Because she is so elevating and she has such warmth and sunshine in her soul, you have to find that within yourself in order to play her, to capture that spirit, which is so genuine,” she says. “She makes you feel good about yourself and about the world.” Lancashire was used to ending many a filming day “depleted” by heavy dramatic material; on Julia, though, she’d feel “repleted” every night. “She had quite an extraordinary impact on me because she is a buoyancy aid,” Lancashire says of Child. “I am now at the stage where I will not have one word said against the woman.”
Quite a jump from not knowing the first thing about Child a few years ago. It’s not hard to gather that this project means a great deal to Lancashire, from the fateful way it reached her to the unprecedented experience of making it. And while she may be a hometown star, she’s managed to keep a low profile even in the U.K.—let alone the U.S., where she’s about to receive a grand introduction. “I’ve worked very hard to avoid the spotlight—you’ve probably figured that out,” she cracks. “I’m four decades into this industry, I’m not going to change.” But Lancashire is anxious about how her Child will land on American shores, saying, “I just hope that she’s welcomed.” This Julia surely will be, as will her portrayer—whether she’s ready or not.
Julia premieres March 31 on HBO Max with its first three episodes. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive spring TV coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.
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