In one of the first scenes of Franklin, the new Apple TV miniseries, the inventor, journalist, editor, politician and writer Benjamin Franklin arrives in Paris in 1776, the year of the declaration of independence of the United States, with the mission of convince King Louis XVI to support the young nation as a way to combat its eternal enemy, England. He does it accompanied by his grandson (Noah Jupe), who comes as secretary. When he tries to get off the carriage that brings him from the port, he must face a crowd that has recognized him and admires him for attributing the invention of electricity to him.
The actor who plays him, Michael Douglas, who will turn 80 in September, knows something about dealing with adoring crowds. For this reason, when he comes to the room after the screening of the first episode to talk about his work, he generates in the audience the same enthusiasm that Franklin must have provoked in the Parisians: “He is an incredible figure, who only went to school for two years and abandoned her at 12. His father was a lower-class candle maker. And yet, he was a true Renaissance man, one of the great writers of the 18th century. But he was also a publisher, he created the University of Pennsylvania, the postal system and the library system of the United States, and as if all that were not enough, he was an inventor,” he says about what attracted him to the statesman.
And then he explains the reason why part of his story had to be told: “At the age of 70 he went to France. In 1776 the average age of mortality in the United States was 39. He was much older than Joe Biden. However, he did not hesitate to get on a boat for two months to cross the Atlantic. He came to France without a plan, on behalf of a country that had no money, no army, and no ships. And they sent him because he was the best known,” he describes. With contagious enthusiasm, Douglas highlights the complexity of his mission, completely unofficial: “It was a brand new democracy that went to ask for support from one of the oldest monarchies.”
One of the best-known actors of his generation, Kirk’s son, who is also one of the producers, had to decide together with Timothy Van Patten, who directed the eight episodes, whether to use a prosthesis to look like the hero or if he appealed to the imagination of the spectators: “I looked at the portrait of Franklin on the 100 dollar bill and I realized that I have no resemblance to him. The same thing happened to us when I played Liberace. But with my producer mind I started to think about all the time it was going to take to put on and take off the makeup, and I also thought it was important to incorporate a touch of my personality.”
Before an enthralled audience, the actor later noted: “I like gray characters. I do not believe in those who are angels nor in those who are demons. Franklin was very ambitious and a bit narcissistic. He was very temperamental and stubborn. He liked to wear very simple clothes with his small fur hat, which gave him a way with people, even when everyone around him wore the typical French Renaissance attire, with hairpieces and white powder on their faces. ”.
In the conversation, Douglas admitted that he had never done a period story: “That was one of the reasons why I wanted to join the project. I also hadn’t done a television comedy when The Kominsky Method came out and I learned a lot from Alan Alda and Chuck Lorre. “I hadn’t even worked with green screens before Marvel’s Ant Man, and it was something I wanted to try,” he says, who throughout the miniseries will show us what the decade that Franklin lived in France was like, until he returned to the United States in 1785. , to continue his political career in Philadelphia, where he died five years later.
