Michael Douglas: I was ‘intimidated’ by playing Founding Father Benjamin Franklin

Oscar-winning actor Douglas, 79, has portrayed real-life people before – memorably pianist Liberace in 2013’s Behind The Candelabra – but he says he was daunted by the prospect of playing Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.

“I was very intimidated by it,” he admits. “Especially the more reading I did about what he accomplished in his life.”

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 Apple TV+’s 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 about what the Founding Father should look like and how he should speak.

Franklin is based on Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff’s book, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, And The Birth Of America.

Douglas takes on the role of the 70-year-old 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’ grandson, Temple Franklin, and he admits having a harder time with the language, but it was up to him to make his French “sound believable”.

He realised that “in two months, I have to sound like I’ve been in France for eight years, which was like, I have no idea how I’m going to do this”, Jupe, 19, says.

“That was one of the motivations, and the other was, I was going to be spending a year in Paris – and I wanted to make friends, I wanted to go out and have fun. I also had to learn French to have a social life.”

Jupe, 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.

“When you’re in France, it took me four months to ask for a croissant without them answering back to me in English. I was like, guys, just let me practise, please, I just want to order my coffee in French.

“But I pride myself in the fact that by the end of the job, I could order my food or have a conversation with someone, and for the first part of the conversation, they didn’t know that I wasn’t French.”

For Jupe, one of the best things about filming the show 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 of these places. There was no green screen, there was no imagining something in the sky – you were actually in these rooms.

“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.”

Douglas agrees with this, adding: “The costumes were spectacular, I’ve never spent more time looking at extras.”

This sense of scale was something director Tim Van Patten, 64, felt passionate about bringing to life.

“The joy of it is the world building,” says Van Patten, who has previously directed episodes of blockbuster TV shows like Boardwalk Empire, The Wire and Game Of Thrones.

“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.”

Douglas also served as a producer, and Van Patten said he “never overstepped boundaries”.

“He was very respectful of the bigger process – it was never about him, it was always about the story. I really appreciated that.

“Because often actors will have executive producer credits and either they’ll choose not to do anything, or maybe interfere too much. But Michael was so diplomatic and smart about it.”

Van Patten says 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 the most from him about being professional and polite and hardworking,” Jupe says.

“He got on set and he remembered everyone’s names, he’s asking people how they are. He’s lifting people up, he’s positive and he’s excited.

“To have that sort of energy coming into a set is really important, because he’s Michael Douglas – everyone’s looking to him.

“He’s been around and he’s leading the charge, so to have that positivity there was incredible to watch, and I hope to take some of that with me one day.”

Franklin premieres with three episodes on Apple TV+ on April 12, followed by a new episode every Friday until May 12.