The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
OSCAR WINNER SEARCHES FOR USA FOUNDING FATHER WITHIN
Actor/producer Michael Douglas and his young co-star Noah Jupe tell Prudence Wade about bringing Benjamin Franklin’s story to small screen
Michael Douglas may be a veteran in the industry, but he’s still intimidated by new roles.
Oscar-winning actor Douglas, 79, has portrayed reallife people before – memorably pianist Liberace in 2013’s Behind The Candelabra – but he says he was daunted by the prospect of playing American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.
“I was very intimidated,” he admits. “Especially the more reading I did about him.”
Franklin was a noted polymath – a scientist and inventor as well as a statesman and Founding Father.
The Founding Fathers were seven men, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who helped found the United States as an independent sovereign state, no longer under British rule.
But that wasn’t the only concern Douglas had about starring in the new historical drama, Franklin. “As an actor, looking at the 100 dollar bill with Ben Franklin’s face on it, I did not see a big resemblance – I was concerned about how much make-up we might have to use,” he remembers.
But then Douglas made a decision to skip hours in the make-up chair every day, trying to make him look like Franklin – and there was a reason for this.
When Douglas played Liberace, he “was a real person and we knew his voice, so we did the whole make-up process”, he explains.
“But with Franklin, we have drawings of what he looked like, but we don’t know his voice and all of that.”
This gave Douglas more of an opportunity to make the role his own as audiences didn’t have quite as many expectations.
Franklin is based on Pulitzer Prizewinning author Stacy Schiff ’s book, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, And The Birth Of America.
Douglas takes on the role of the 70-yearold inventor, who is known for his electrical experiments, and is sent to Paris in 1776 to secure French backing against the British in the American Revolution.
The eight-part series spans eight years and catches Franklin just after he signed the Declaration of Independence alongside the other Founding Fathers. Douglas speaks
French, but says filming plenty of scenes in the language was quite revealing. “I didn’t know my French was this bad,” he jokes.
British actor Noah Jupe plays Douglas’s grandson, Temple Franklin, and he admits having a harder time, but it was up to him to make his French “sound believable”.
Jupe, 19, who has previously appeared in TV series The Night Manager and horror film A Quiet Place, says he managed to get through “by the skin of my teeth”.
He says: “I managed to work out that if I focused on the accent, that would be the most believable thing. If the accent was off, then you would know that I didn’t really speak French. So I focused a lot on the accent, and then the French came later on in the job as I spent more time hanging out with friends.”
For Jupe, one of the best things was the sheer scale of the production.
“We only had two sets that were made for the show – the rest were actual buildings or chateaux or the Palace of Versailles,” he says.
“We were on location for most of the shoot, which was, as an actor, a dream, because you were actually stood in all these places.
“There were 400 or 500 extras every day on set, all dressed in these incredible gowns and wigs – you truly felt like you were part of the 1700s. It was very lucky, because it wasn’t that hard to act, because you felt very present.”
This sense of scale was something director Tim Van Patten, 64, felt passionate about bringing to life.
“I love world building, I want to create a world where the actors can step on to a stage and feel as if they’ve been transported, and take that worry away from them,” he said.
Douglas was also a producer and Van Patten said he “never overstepped boundaries”. He added Douglas was a “pleasure” to work with, who “loved the cast and crew”, making sure he learned everyone’s name.
As an actor starting out in his career, this is also something Jupe took away from his time working with Douglas.
“I learned about being professional and polite and hardworking,” Jupe says. “He got on set and he remembered everyone’s names, he’s asking how they are. He’s lifting people up, he’s positive and he’s excited. I hope to bring that too some day.”