Julia Child is remembered as a beacon of onscreen warmth—the type of chef who’d suggest adding an extra stick of butter when a recipe went sideways, whose whimsy made viewers feel as if she were standing in their own kitchen. But the person beneath the apron was far more complicated, as the Max series Julia proves.

After revolutionizing the American culinary scene with both her WGBH series The French Chef and her cookbook, The Art of Mastering French Cooking, season two finds Julia facing an even bigger challenge: doing it all again. As played by British actor Sarah Lancashire, TV’s Julia films at the White House, contemplates a move to CBS, and continues to navigate her newly modern marriage with David Hyde Pierce’s Paul Child. But for all of the ground she herself breaks, Julia sometimes confronts progress in a way that contradicts her warm and cuddly reputation.

As series creator Daniel Goldfarb (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and showrunner Christopher Keyser (Party of Five) tell Vanity Fair, the secret ingredient to capturing Julia’s spirit is embracing those complexities—and turning our attention to the people who surrounded the persona.

Vanity Fair: Season two explores the pressure Julia feels to deliver a second season of The French Chef and a second edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Did you both feel those same stakes for season two of a show about her?

Daniel Goldfarb: In the first season, Julia was having this second act. Julia’s marriage was changing. They were inventing the cooking show. Julia wanted something and went after it. And in the second season, she has it. The big thing that Chris and I had to talk about before we even convened with the writers’ room was, what’s Julia’s arc? We talked a lot about the societal changes going on, but also what’s Julia’s relationship with change? Is she going to embrace it? The real Julia was so full of contradictions, that it felt like she was the perfect character to dramatize all of these [societal] changes.

Christopher Keyser: We had in our back pockets, France. The show is very visual and sensual and about the pleasures of life, so sending Julia back to France was a really good way for us to talk about past and future and this concept of change. But simply the idea of being in extraordinarily gorgeous places with bigger meals than we’ve ever had [series food stylist] Christine Tobin cook before and the ornate beauty of Le Grand Véfour in Paris, that gave us a chance to do the thing you want to do at a second season of a show, which is to promise change without change. The show’s going to move forward—but it’s not going to lose any of the stuff it had before.

The show’s title is somewhat deceiving in that it’s about the people around Julia Child, rather than a straightforward biopic of her. How do you balance an incredible ensemble while still ensuring that the storylines circle back to Julia?

Goldfarb: Look, the show is called Julia, and people want to see Julia, but we love working on the other stories. We’ve now been able to break point of view and go home with Judith (Fiona Glasscott) and meet her husband, and not just see her with Blanche (Judith Light), or give Avis (Bebe Neuwirth) a storyline we set up at the end of the first season. What connects everyone is their relationships with Julia, but we want to make sure we get to see everyone in their own lives.

Keyser: We adapted a structure that made it possible to do all of those things. It’s a pretty fast-moving show, so we couldn’t do a version in which every character had a full story, every single episode, with the beginning, middle, and end. What you are allowed to do in modern television is that the characters’ arcs really extend over the whole season.

How do you let research inform the story without feeling bound to total accuracy?

Goldfarb: There’s a lot that’s been written about Julia, and what’s so fascinating is that different people have different versions of the same stories. Julia contradicts herself. Those contradictions make her really a fascinating character to dramatize, and I think allowed us to read in between the lines with her. And then we have Sarah, who’s so incredible at bringing an interior life to the fore.

There’s little things; in My Life in France, Julia writes very briefly about what happened with Paul and how he lost his job. And part of what’s so interesting about it is A, she does write about it, but B, she writes about it for one paragraph. It doesn’t get a whole chapter, it doesn’t get 30 pages. She doesn’t make her case. She’s straightforward, but she moves on. And the lack of words, while not running away from it, was something that we were really excited to lean into and try and color that in and bring it to life. Same with her relationship with Simca (Isabella Rossellini). It’s what she doesn’t say about Simca that’s just as interesting as what she does say.

Keyser: We do lots of research, but we’re pretty unconstrained as long as we’re true to the characters. Then when you look at the whole season, there’s not that much [that actually happened].

Do you ever get pushback from people that want it to be more strictly biographical?

Goldfarb: For the most part, we haven’t. What’s been really nice is when season one came out, we got a number of notes from people that knew Julia that felt like we were really true to the spirit of Julia. That was incredibly rewarding and gratifying. We have the Julia Child Foundation consulting with us, so it feels like we have their blessing. They know where our heart is, and they believe in the choices we’re making. Once in a while I’ll see something on social media or whatever, but for the most part, people have really embraced our Julia.

You play with fact and faction when it comes to Elaine, The French Chef’s new director, played by Rachel Bloom. She is not necessarily based on a real person, but is rooted in attitudes that Julia perhaps held about working with other women, particularly taking direction from them, at that time. Can you talk about leaning into the qualities of Julia that aren’t necessarily the most warm and cuddly?

Goldfarb: Julia championed women, but she also would say some pretty outrageous things about women, and those contradictions were really exciting for us to dramatize. We also knew that when The French Chef went on the air, WGBH was almost exclusively staffed by men. By the time The French Chef went off the air, it was 75% women. So public television went through major changes. Elaine felt like a way to begin to dramatize that. She’s a little bit ahead of her time. She’s there a little too soon. And we did think it was important not to just ignore some of the parts of the biography of Julia that aren’t completely effervescent and lovable.

Keyser: There’s a real risk in biopics that you start at the end and think, “Everything moves inexorably toward where people ended up in life.” And we were really intent on not doing that, on forcing the characters to live through the uncertainty that they must have. No one knew what the future was going to be. All of them had to deal with questions about what they wanted out of life.

Before the feminist movement really began to develop its momentum, there was a moment where Julia wasn’t certain who she was going to be, where she wasn’t always a champion of the right things. If we go into a third season—and we hope we will—I’m sure it’ll be complicated for all of the characters on our show, but WGBH itself is going to really start to change much more quickly. And everyone’s going to have to either get on board, or be left behind.

I find it puzzling when people refer to the show as a “comfort watch,” because that sometimes feels at odds with what’s actually going on. This season deals with issues of equality, of access to contraception. In the finale, characters are working to thwart the FBI! How does the “cozy” moniker sit with you?

Goldfarb: I attribute it to the marriage, actually. There’s something about Julia and Paul’s love of each other and lust for each other that I think is very aspirational. And the food. But there’s something about them that I think makes people feel warm. There’s conflict in the marriage. The whole first season she had this big secret, and now in the second season starting with episode four, she has a secret again. But she’s keeping the secret to protect him, and then ultimately the secret comes out, and they get even closer. So I think that’s why people think the show is cozy and warm and kind.

But I agree with you. Episode five, where Paul’s twin brother comes, that’s an example of Julia in all her contradictions. She lies about the origins of the show and when Alice calls her on it, she says, “My brand is honesty,” when she’s just made something up. So we love leaning into Julia as an amazing, complicated, three-dimensional woman. So thank you for saying it’s not just cozy.

Keyser: We are very committed to the idea that the whole thing feels light as a feather, that it lands with weight, but you are not noticing because it has a breezy quality. The kind of person that Julia surrounded herself with is full of optimism about the idea that tomorrow could be better than today. They’re all open to the possibilities of life, even when it’s difficult.

If there’s anything that Daniel and I in the writers’ room focus on all the time, it’s how do you tell a potentially dramatic story, but—not to keep mixing metaphors—that on the inside just feels like a soufflé.

This interview has been edited and condensed.