Julia Child May Be the Most Famous Woman on ‘Julia,’ but She’s Far from the Only One

Mark Peikert
·5 min read
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The most audacious aspect of Max’s “Julia” (now in its second season) is that Julia Child might not be the most accomplished real-life character in it. That might be Bebe Neuwirth’s Avis DeVoto, who, with husband Bernard, helped save the national forests from the U.S. government. Or maybe it’s Judith Jones (Fiona Glascott), who pulled a book out of a slush pile and thus became responsible for publishing “The Diary of Anne Frank,” among other accomplishments that include the English translations of Sartre and Camus. Then again, it might be Blanche Knopf (Judith Light), the powerhouse publisher who co-founded Knopf with her husband and helped elevate the mystery genre to high art by publishing everyone from Dashiell Hammett to Ross Macdonald.

But in Episode 7, we meet Zephyr Wright (Deidrie Henry), President Johnson’s longtime housekeeper who came with the family to the White House — and helped push through the Civil Rights Act by sharing her personal experiences with the President. She stoically accepts the verbal abuse of the White House chef before eventually coming to the aid of Alice and Julia with plates of shrimp and grits when no one else bothered to feed them during a visit for a documentary segment. Later, she tells Alice that there are many ways to enact change; some are loud and some are silent. It’s a quiet rebuke to Alice’s unconscious recoil at seeing another Black woman silent acceptance of the situation, because Zephyr knows that her true place is in Johnson’s ear. “We talk,” she stresses to Alice on a bus bench. It’s a powerful moment and also a timely one in a world that increasingly demands everyone have an informed opinion on every major world event to share on social media. There are many activism lanes; some are not as obvious as others.

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That exchange is just part of the tapestry of what makes “Julia” more than a comfort watch (though it is that, in spades). The women with whom Julia Child surrounded herself are forces of nature and even in a show named for her, those women each get many chances to step into the spotlight. Audiences may tune in for Julia Child, but they’re also learning about the history of 20th-century publishing and the lingering, insidious effects of the government’s anti-Communist witch hunts.

“It would have been easy to do this show with everyone simply related to Julia,” showrunner Chris Keyser told IndieWire. “She collected people around her. It was a thing back then, you know, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s Robert Lowell and his group and Julia Child and hers. All these incredible people whose lives are worthy of stories of themselves.”

The series’ intention was always to use Child as a hub and explore the satellites revolving around her. Thus, we get subplots ranging from Judith and Blanche struggling with Blanche’s dimming eyesight while offering notes to Macdonald to Avis and Sartre spending the afternoon in Paris together. Those two scenes offer an insight into how “Julia” approaches its real-life characters within a fictionalized context.

“We have to get the essence of these characters right,” Keyser said. “We have to be truthful, broadly speaking, to the historical facts. But so much of what we talk about happens in closed rooms where no one reported what actually goes on. The story is about what might have been, what could have been true for Blanche and Judith, and for Avis and Julia as well.”

That ethos leads “Julia” to what the best historical fiction does: recontextualize the past through a modern lens. That’s one of the aspects that makes the moment between Alice and Zephry so powerful. “We always call it the ‘Amadeus’ version of Julia Child’s life or the fable version of Julia Child’s life,” series creator Daniel Goldfarb told IndieWire. “We feel the subtext of the story is true to the way we have read the research, and we love that we get to tell the story between the lines.”

That led to taking Child’s real (and negative) experience at the White House during the Johnson administration and moving it earlier in the chronology of her life. “In investigating that, we learned about Zephyr Wright,” Keyser said. “And the episode shifted in some ways toward a story about Zephyr’s experience and how she managed to change the world in ways.”

“[Zephyr] also challenges Alice because they’re from a different generation. I can’t know what people of color went through then or at any point, but it does feel in some ways that it represents the generational conversation that happens all the time between youth that’s full of energy and the desire to see things change quickly and [people with] experience that say change happens and you play the part you play, but in some ways, it has to be reflective of the world you live in. So Zephyr’s story is a story about the quiet triumph of somebody who is virtually invisible in life [but] who made an enormous impact on things. And that’s meaningful for Alice as a young woman of color who wants, and rightly so, things to change now.”

But the overwhelming aim of “Julia” is to feel, as Goldfarb put it, “like a souffle. But like a good souffle, it’s made out of real ingredients that have real substance.”

“It’s not an attempt to be a full history. It’s an attempt to be a comedy that lightly touches on things and leaves you thinking about stuff,” Keyser added.

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