Julia Child’s life will be dramatized in a brand-new HBO Max show, Julia, starring British actress Sarah Lancashire. The show offers a behind-the-scenes look at Child's long-running television series, The French Chef, which pioneered the concept of the modern cooking show in America. Julia, according to HBO Max, "explores a pivotal time in American history—the emergence of public television as a new social institution, feminism and the women's movement, the nature of celebrity and America's cultural evolution. At its heart, the series is a portrait of a loving marriage with a shifting power dynamic."
Here's everything we know so far about Julia.
The first trailer just dropped.
"As this stage of my life, I want to feel relevant," Julia says in the trailer. She proposes an "educational cooking show," that she will host, and public television executives are against it from the start. "One of the advantages of looking like me," she says, "is that you learn at a young age how not to take no for an answer."
Yet once she gets the show greenlit, she starts to have doubts. Her husband Paul reminds her, "If every critic would silence every artist, how dull would the world be then?"
Watch the full trailer here:
Sarah Lancashire stars as Julia Child.
The British actress takes on the role of Julia Child. This isn't her first starring role on TV. In the '90s and early 2000s, she starred in British shows Coronation Street, Where the Heart Is, Clocking Off, and Seeing Red.
Her most critically acclaimed role came in Last Tango in Halifax (2012-2020), where she plays the daughter of the protagonist who finds love late in life, and in the British crime drama Happy Valley, where she plays a police sergeant in West Yorkshire.
Julia's creator Daniel Goldfarb told People "Sarah Lancashire, one of the world's great actors, brings her fully to life, in all her inspiring complexity and humanity. I can't wait for the world to see her Julia."
The rest of the cast of Julia is star-studded.
David Hyde Pierce stars as Julia's husband Paul Child; Bebe Neuwirth as American culinary editor Avis DeVoto; Fiona Glascott as Judith Jones, the editor who discovered Julia Child; Brittany Bradford as associate television producer Alice; and Fran Kranz as American television producer Russ Morash.
Guest stars include Isabella Rossellini, Judith Light, Robert Joy, Erin Neufer, Jefferson Mays, James Cromwell, and Adriane Lenox.
The showrunner says Julia is about joy.
Showrunner Christopher Keyser told People, "Julia Child changed our attitude about food. She put public television on the map. She modeled the idea of a modern, independent woman. And yet all of that put together doesn't quite explain why, 60 years later, we still can't get her out of our heads."
Keyser continued, "That has something to do with our intuition that how she approached cooking is how we should approach all of life. It's also how we tried to make this show — with joy, about joy."
Alongside showrunner Keyser and creator Goldfarb, the executive producers are Erwin Stoff of 3 Arts Entertainment, Kimberly Carver, Charles McDougall, and Erica Lipez. The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts is also involved in the show.
The French Chef, Julia Child's original show, is currently available to stream.
You can stream the show that Julia is based on via Pluto TV.
Watch The French Chef on PlutoTV
Julia premieres Thursday, March 31.
The first three episodes will drop on HBO Max on Thursday, March 31, and the next five episodes will drop weekly through May 5.
Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram.
