‘People need to feel warmth in their souls’: Lancashire’s recipe for role as cooking icon Julia Child

A new series about the life of cooking icon Julia Child has a surprise twist for fans of one of TV’s biggest ever sitcoms.

In the first scene David Hyde Pierce filmed with Sarah Lancashire in the new series Julia - which focuses on American cooking icon Julia Child’s midlife pivot to TV master chef - she made her on-screen husband a classic French omelette.

And the British actress did it all on camera.

“Sarah cooked me an omelette at this great big honking stove we had on set, and she did it with such ease and familiarity and panache. It was delicious, and it was crazy because she can do that,” laughs Hyde Pierce, who’s best known for playing Niles Crane in the classic 1990s sitcom Frasier.

“She didn’t have to add cooking to all the other stuff she had to learn to play Julia, which was a huge gift for her but also for us.”

“She just came in and kind of inhabited it,” adds Bebe Neuwirth, who plays Julia’s best friend, Avis (and, to the joy of Frasier fans everywhere, is reunited on screen with Hyde Pierce after her turn as the titular character’s wife, Dr Lilith Sternin).

“I knew who Sarah was because I had seen her in Happy Valley but it was really stunning to see someone who didn’t really know much about Julia put on that wig and that make-up and stand behind a stove and you go, ‘Oh look, Julia Child is with us now’.”

Strikingly, mimicking Child’s mastery in the kitchen was not a concern for Lancashire.

“I learnt to cook from an early age and I’m very comfortable in a kitchen,” smiles Lancashire over Zoom from London.

Sarah Lancashire rules the kitchen in Julia.

“I was very lucky as a child because my mum is a superb cook and roped myself and my siblings into the kitchen at a very young age and we were peeling and chopping potatoes. Technically I’m quite adept so the cooking was not an issue for me. I didn’t feel like it was a hurdle I had to get over and that was a huge relief in playing Julia.”

Child, of course, is a very American icon. And on paper, Brit Lancashire is an unexpected choice to play the famed chef who taught Americans about French cooking and propelled beef bourguignon, coq au vin, and steak frites into the vernacular.

“I think it makes it slightly easier that I didn’t grow up with Julia, that I didn’t have this legacy sitting on my shoulder,” continues Lancashire.

“She wasn’t part of popular culture in the UK, so she wasn’t part of everyday language for me and I think that was slightly liberating in a sense.”

Still, there are some similarities between the two.

Lancashire is a beloved figure, particularly in the UK and Australia thanks to her stunning performances in shows such as Happy Valley and Last Tango in Halifax.

In person, however, she’s not keen to give much of herself away.

Asked how she related to Julia’s own growing unease with celebrity given her own megawatt profile in the UK, Lancashire swats the question away.

“A loss of anonymity for some people is not a pleasant experience, and people deal with it better than others,” she says.

Even when asked whether she’d gone back to Nora Ephron’s 2009 film, Julie & Julia, which starred Meryl Streep as Julia and Amy Adams as a young woman who aspires to cook all 524 recipes in Child’s classic cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Lancashire isn’t keen to draw any parallels.

“I had seen the film. I saw it when it first came out and that was really the first time that I became aware of Julia Child, mostly because of the marketing surrounding the film but I didn’t revisit it,” she explains.

Sarah Lancashire, right, with Bebe Neuwirth in a scene from Julia.

“Our piece is completely different, and the writing is completely different to the film so it would have been a futile exercise to use that as a form of research.”

Lancashire plays the exuberant Child brilliantly, and with much more quiet vulnerability than Streep, whose Oscar-nominated performance verged on caricature at times.

Lancashire’s Julia is aware that, at a towering 188cm and with her uniquely sing-songy voice, she’s often the butt of jokes and doesn’t “fit” into the mould of how women were supposed to look and act in the 1960s. (The scenes with Julia’s disapproving dad, played by a typically crotchety James Cromwell will break your heart.)

“I suppose when I was approaching this, I never approached it as a comedy, I wasn’t convinced it was a comedy, to be perfectly honest,” Lancashire says.

“I thought if everybody else wanted to treat it as a comedy, they can do; I’m just going to do my Julia Child in the only way I know how.”

Lancashire says she was often asked on set to play up Child’s eccentricities for laughs.

“Occasionally I would be asked to take (her voice) a little bit higher and I would always resist and say no, absolutely not. She’s a woman who could very easily be lampooned because of her exuberance but you don’t need to do that, it wasn’t necessary to do that.”

Asked if the series will still resonate with audiences in Australia or the UK where Child was not overly known, Lancashire is ambivalent.

“I don’t know whether I want (audiences) to learn anything. I don’t feel we’re there to educate, I think we are firmly there to entertain but if they haven’t encountered Julia then I want them to hopefully witness a rather beautiful Bird of Paradise because that’s how I really see her,” Lancashire muses.

“I think she was so singular, so unique and so unselfconscious and so positive in her outlook on life, she’s a tonic. I think she’s coming at a good time when people need to feel warmth in their souls. I think we’re ready for that.”

Julia, April 3, 8.30pm, Fox Showcase and On Demand

Originally published as ‘People need to feel warmth in their souls’: Lancashire’s recipe for role as cooking icon Julia Child