Michael Douglas Says Playing Ben Franklin Made Him More Hopeful About Joe Biden

Rémy Grandroques

Asking Michael Douglas about farts wasn’t on my personal bucket list, but sometimes these opportunities just fall in your lap. The steely icon with the nail-file voice is (perhaps surprisingly) playing Benjamin Franklin in the new Apple TV+ series, Franklin, based on Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff’s 2006 biography about the founding father’s trip to France in 1776 to negotiate an unlikely alliance between a budding republic and the ancien régime.

The arranging publicist requested questions be limited to Douglas’s new show, whose first three episodes hit streaming today. This seemed like an acceptable stipulation, considering the impossibility of covering a 50-year-career in show business—spanning seventies TV cop dramas, eighties adventure romps, nineties sex thrillers, and Golden Globe-winning turns in Netflix comedies—in a single interview. Franklin is, after all, Douglas’s first period piece – this according to both Douglas himself and the show’s press notes. This arguably gives short shrift to Douglas’s Emmy-winning turn as Liberace in Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra, but Franklin is at very least Douglas’ first period piece set before the invention of photography.

It’s hard to square at first, the idea of the bespectacled inventor of the bifocal with the silver-fox star of Falling Down sitting before me. Yet there are undoubtedly some intriguing parallels. When he undertook his perilous Atlantic crossing—on pain of death if he’d been captured by the English, to say nothing of the inherent dangers of crossing the ocean back then—Franklin was 70, almost impossibly old in an era when the average life expectancy was 39. Yet when Franklin arrived, he was treated like a rock star; there are historical accounts of Parisian ladies swooning at the very sight of the gouty printer, famous in his own time as both the inventor of the lightning rod and an avatar of the Enlightenment on par with Voltaire (who before he died in 1778 would pay his own respects to the Boston-bred Philadelphian).

Douglas—whose famous father lived to be 103—is 79 now, but seems much younger, despite a bout with stage IV tongue cancer originally diagnosed in 2010. It seems to have had a faint effect on Douglas’ elocution, but the familiar rasp is still intact—the kind of inimitable voice you could identify across a crowded room. Not only does playing Ben Franklin feel like a departure for a guy my generation might know from Wall Street or The Game, it feels like something new for TV as a whole.

Ben Franklin and his time in France have previously been already portrayed (beautifully) by Tom Wilkinson in HBO’s John Adams. Franklin, adapted by Howard Korder (Boardwalk Empire) and Kirk Ellis, who won two Emmy awards for his writing work on John Adams, is a distinct take on Benjamin Franklin, not to mention on Adams (who shows up in Franklin’s third episode, played by Eddie Marsan). To have two distinct perspectives on the same historical figures so relatively near to each other feels new. TV has done history before, but rarely historiography. Also, Ben Franklin cuts a huge fart in an early scene.

For his part, Douglas seems to have taken the role largely because, even at 79, he hasn’t gotten tired of trying new things. What could make him more suited to play America’s first multihyphenate, Ben Franklin, the printer, author, inventor, statesman, diplomat, and all around lover of life?

I still think of you as the king of the erotic thriller a little bit. What made you think—

You weren't old enough to see those. You must have been sneaking into that theater.

I’m not that young. I just have the touch-up turned on in my Zoom. So what made you think, Hey, I should play the inventor of the bifocal?

Well, probably a couple of reasons. These last few years in this 50-year career, I've started to think, well, what haven't I done? I wanted to try to learn a little more comedy, so I did the Kominsky Method. I never did any greenscreen action stuff, so we did Ant-Man. And I've never done a period picture, so that was there. But then Ben Franklin is just an extraordinary character. I knew a lot about him from high school history classes and all of that, but this whole chapter, after all that he had accomplished in his life, with Poor Richard's Almanack as a writer, as a publisher, as a printer, and with the University of Pennsylvania, he created our library system—all of this, but I didn't know this section of when he was 70 years old finalizing the Declaration of Independence with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, that he was asked in the same year, six weeks later, at 70 years old, to go to France and talk the French into supporting us in our struggle against England.

I was immediately struck. Like, 70 years old—in England or in America in 1800, the average lifespan was 39 years old. I think it gave me great faith in Joe Biden, and was a reminder that we can go on a lot longer than we thought. And then the risk that he was taking to gamble and then the reality that if he failed there would not be a United States of America… I thought, this is a great script, but it's also a great story.

You mentioned you wanted to do a period piece. Were there other period roles over the years that you wanted or that you tried out for that you didn't book?

There were a couple that I was offered, which I'm very glad I didn't do. But this one was too good, and it turned out to be probably one of the best experiences I've ever had. I truly enjoyed my time in France and the incredible craft of the French film industry. I've never seen any kind of show where I was so aware of extras and how good they are and how much texture they bring to something like this.

So you don't want to name those period pieces that you were happy that you turned down?

No, somebody else did them, and it turns out I was glad I turned them down. They were turkeys.

I've watched almost the whole series. I noticed Ben Franklin seems to have a particular fixation on farts. Was this your first big fart scene that you've done in a show or a movie?

[pause] I think I had a couple of farts in Kominsky Method. For a second I thought you were speaking about something high-level, like farce. He did have a lot of farce, but I think that was my addition to the character. But it wasn’t a lot [of farting.] Come on. I think over eight hours he maybe farted twice. Give me a break.

Can you tell me about the accent? Ben Franklin is an interesting case. He was American, but from before there was really an America. Did you have any conversations about what his accent should sound like?

We did, but we also had conversations about the fact that nobody knew what he sounded like. I would read some of his Poor Richard's Almanack writings and get a sense of it. But he was from Boston, originally. His father was a candle maker. He really was the gentleman that began the middle class. He started what became the middle class. That, I think was part of his big desire in creating a democratic system. People have told me that I speak with an Adirondack accent, and so I said, Well, that's good enough for me. And as long as I speak slowly and articulate, I think we'll be fine. Noah Jupe, who plays [Franklin’s grandson] Temple, had a different situation, because he really came from England and I took him under my wing. So he had a mix of a British and American accent.

As far as you having to do so much dialogue in French, is this the first time you've had to do this many lines in a different language?

Yeah, I speak a little bit of French. I spoke about as well in French as Franklin was supposed to be able to speak, so that was not overtly difficult. Although I prided myself on my French until I spoke in France, and I sounded just like every American tourist. Noah didn't speak any at first, but got good at it in the period that we were there.

I read most of the book that the series is based on, and it mentions quite a lot that Ben Franklin arrived basically covered in boils and with only a few strands of hair on the top of his head. And then you show up, looking like a silver fox rockstar. Were there conversations about how much realism is too much realism in that regard?

I mean, I think the boils when he first arrived and everything was in regards to 60 days on the boat. But without getting too complicated, we were doing what's called block shooting, which means that over eight episodes, which covered eight years, all the scenes that may be in one room over those eight episodes are shot at the same time. So then you want to try to limit the amount of makeup changes, not to mention the amount of makeup in general, because we're on a production schedule, even though we shot 160 days. So those are the decisions. And I fooled around with more makeup early on, and appliances and everything else, so that [I] looked more like the $100 bill. But we thought there was a balance to get. First of all, we were nervous about how much time the makeup would take each day.

And because of the fact that in one day we would be shooting three different episodes from three different times–we had the gout going for him over that period of time. And finally, I did a show for HBO a few years ago where I played Liberace called Behind the Candelabra. That was a two-hour movie that involved a character who we hear speak, we know how he looks and everything else, so there was a sort of a need to do [all the makeup], plus it was only two hours. When you do eight hours, I think we all agreed, you want a little persona of the actor who's playing that part, but particularly if he's a familiar actor, you want somebody that you can kind of latch onto. You're the first person who's raised that—the description of when he first arrives. I appreciate it.

The other big cable-drama portrayal of Ben Franklin was Tom Wilkinson in the John Adams miniseries. Had you watched that, or do you try to avoid other people's takes on your characters?

No, I mean, I remember watching it when it came out and Tom was a fabulous actor. He was wonderful. We have a John Adams in our piece too and I remember the show, but that was a few years ago and I didn't go back to watch it or anything. I didn't think about doing it differently. I never even thought about it.

We know Franklin from the words that he's written, but we don't know what his voice sounds like. Did his written word inform the way that you imagine his voice or how you imagined the way that he spoke?

Yeah, well he had a lot of wit and humor; sardonic, obviously extremely bright, seemed to kind of balance things off. He was a logician, always trying to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator, trying to see both sides of the picture. And ultimately he tried to seduce anybody that was in front of him, man or woman. He used all of his rock-star aura—and then everybody who met him would think, Oh, he's such a humble guy. Well, he wasn't so humble, really, but he knew how to play these roles, and to kind of underdress versus the French court he was operating under. He had that fur cap, that was picked up later by Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. So you kind of settle into that.

He’s 70, but all the ladies are very interested in Ben Franklin. He clearly had an effect on the French women of the time.

Well, he was a rock star, number one. He was famous. He showed interest in the ladies. He would make his best effort. It wasn't necessarily that they found him hot, but they enjoyed his company. He flattered well, and he was one of the most famous people in the world. So you find more than one reason to want to spend time with him.

Originally Appeared on GQ