Sarah Lancashire “resisted” attempts to make Julia more comedic

By David Craig

Published: Tuesday, 12 April 2022 at 12:00 am

Sarah Lancashire has revealed that she denied requests to make her interpretation of celebrity chef Julia Child more comedic.

The Happy Valley star portrays Child in an eight-part series exploring how she launched The French Chef on a local American television station – an influential programme widely regarded as the first modern cooking show.

While Julia, which airs on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK, is billed as a comedy-drama, Lancashire told RadioTimes.com and other press that she never saw it as such.

“When I was approaching this, I never approached it as a comedy,” she began. “I wasn’t convinced it was a comedy, to be perfectly honest. I thought, ‘If everybody else wants 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.’

“And maybe that was a degree of fear or insecurity, but I just had to cling on to everything that I knew in terms of character development.”

While she never became particularly famous in the UK, Child was – and remains to this day – a household name across the United States, enrapturing legions of fans with her warm presenting style and sharp sense of humour.

But while she was undoubtedly witty, Lancashire did not wish to turn her into a joke character, which is why she stood firmly against amping up the more eccentric aspects of her demeanour.

She continued: “Occasionally, I would be asked to take it a little bit higher and I would always resist. I would always say, ‘No, absolutely not’. I think she’s a woman who could be very easily lampooned because of her exuberance, but you don’t need to do that. It wasn’t necessary to do that.