One part of his brain is stuck in a screwball-ish snow-globe of the 1960s, its focus whirring around a plucky female standup, her story taking on both Jewishness and second-wave feminism.
Another part has decidedly veered to the 1970s — to the world of the first celebrity chef, to the genre of television she pioneered, to a marriage that still manages to fascinate.
Adept at working in different gears at once, Daniel Goldfarb was on a solely one-track mission the other day while catching me up on the phone. The Toronto-sprung creator of “Julia” (a yummy new HBO Max series about Julia Child that essentially picks up where the movie “Julie & Julia” left off), who until recently was a producer on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (the Emmy-winning Amazon show that recently rang in its fourth season), he had a lot of ground to cover. All ears: me.
“She invented the modern cooking show as we know it,” he was saying about the woman at the heart of his series. “She is guileless, a teacher at heart … has that twinkle. Doing it all on the other side of 50. But she is also full of contradictions, which is why she was so fun to write. On one hand, she is a very determined woman of a certain age who did it her way and was very forward with her thinking … some might see her as a feminist. But she did it by putting on these pearls, standing behind a counter, giving a kind of 1950s housewife.”
For Goldfarb, a graduate of Juilliard as well as New York University’s Department of Dramatic Writing at Tisch, where he continues to teach, and Earl Haig Secondary School in North York, where his drama dreams first churned, it was quite the road to this latest project. The Canadian has written several plays and musicals, his immersion in the world of New York theatre abated by working as a writer’s assistant early on.
“In terms of my assistant skills, I was not that great,” he chuckled. “But I was so in awe of it … so excited about being part of the company of writers, I think I was just good company.”
His own acquaintance with Julia? It came as a kid. His mother would cook from her recipes and later even wrote a cookbook herself. Mainly, he was aware of the superstar chef through the infamous Dan Aykroyd impression on “Saturday Night Live,” as well as her “hilarious and amazing David Letterman appearances” — an inextricable part of pop culture at the time. He was not, however, that familiar with her show “The French Chef” and, in preparing to create “Julia,” he dove deep into its archives.
Writing and cooking. Cooking and writing. That sort of became his process then. “I brought the laptop to my kitchen and started cooking.” He got through most of her greatest hits — the coq au vin and the boeuf bourguignon — and got good at his crepes game. “I still make her crepes every Saturday morning for my girls,” his two daughters he shares with wife Marianna.
The deeper he got into the pilot, the more joyful an experience it became. “It just birthed itself,” as Goldfarb puts it.
In terms of giving it further life, the casting of Sarah Lancashire was the secret sauce (so to speak, ahem). Full stop: the English actor is a delight in the role, nailing the flutiness of Child and her optimism, while adding depth and pangs of vulnerability. Goldfarb added: “She has incredibly expressive eyes. Can convey conflicting thoughts simultaneously. You can see the wheels turning and she can play the interior life of Julia, which of course you cannot get from the documentaries about her.”
For the role of husband Paul Child, Goldfarb actually had David Hyde Pierce in mind when writing (he looks so much like Paul), but initially, when the show about to go into production pre-pandemic — they were shut down about an hour before the first table read — Pierce was unavailable. Declined. When they circled back later, however, his schedule had opened up. “It was kismet.”
The show does not disappoint with its conga line of thespians, including Bebe Neuwirth (which allows us a mini-“Frasier” reunion with Pierce) and the always-dependable Judith Light.
Watching the show, and thinking about both the thrills and challenges of creating narratives around real-life people, I thought about the insertion of Lenny Bruce in the “Maisel” universe (the groundbreaking comedian, played with extreme panache by Luke Kirby in that show). Did he take a similar approach with Julia, I wondered.
“With Lenny, all of us on the show watched footage. His comedy you see on ‘Maisel,’ the words are all his. But in general, with these sort of characters, you do a lot of meticulous research and you read between the lines. From the research, you craft story,” Goldfarb explained.
Calling Julia “a not totally comedy, not totally drama,” but very sincere in its tone, Goldfarb went on to say that the architecture of the first season was meant to explore the invention of the modern marriage (which Julia and Paul personified). “We start with a working marriage, a good marriage … but a more traditional one. But because of this second act of Julia’s, by the end of the season it has become a partnership.” (“I am the part of the iceberg that you don’t see above water,” Paul says at one point.)
The term “second act” came up again and again when we were talking. And it is true: Julia Child continues to intrigue not only because she was an OG influencer, but her story was the story about late blooming — finding your passions later in life, essentially.
In the end, as our phone call was winding up, Goldfarb could not help but muse on the meta-ness of his latest series. “The show is about the first season of her show, so I was writing the first season about a first season,” he said. Plus: “I am almost the same age as Julia … doing what I love to do.”
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