{"id":13694,"date":"2022-04-12T08:00:42","date_gmt":"2022-04-12T06:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiotimes.com\/?p=1623390"},"modified":"2022-04-12T08:29:27","modified_gmt":"2022-04-12T06:29:27","slug":"sarah-lancashire-resisted-attempts-to-make-julia-more-comedic","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/rss_feed\/sarah-lancashire-resisted-attempts-to-make-julia-more-comedic\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Lancashire \u201cresisted\u201d attempts to make Julia more comedic"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By David Craig\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Tuesday, 12 April 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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Sarah Lancashire has revealed that she denied requests to make her interpretation of celebrity chef Julia Child more comedic.<\/p>\n

The Happy Valley<\/a> star portrays Child in an eight-part series exploring how she launched The French Chef on a local American television station \u2013 an influential programme widely regarded as the first modern cooking show.<\/p>\n

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

\u201cWhen I was approaching this, I never approached it as a comedy,\u201d she began. \u201cI wasn\u2019t convinced it was a comedy, to be perfectly honest. I thought, \u2018If everybody else wants to treat it as a comedy they can do\u2026 I\u2019m just going to do my Julia Child in the only way I know how.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

While she never became particularly famous in the UK, Child was \u2013 and remains to this day \u2013 a household name across the United States, enrapturing legions of fans with her warm presenting style and sharp sense of humour.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

She continued: \u201cOccasionally, I would be asked to take it a little bit higher and I would always resist. <\/span>I would always say, \u2018No, absolutely not\u2019. I think she\u2019s a woman who could be very easily lampooned because of her exuberance, but you don\u2019t need to do that. It wasn\u2019t necessary to do that.<\/span><\/p>\n