The first time David Hyde Pierce watched Sarah Lancashire play Julia Child, she prepared him a meal. The cameras rolled as she cracked eggs in both hands at once. She turned an omelet over with one flip, then slid it onto a plate without a utensil in sight. She garnished the dish with parsley as if it were her millionth try. Director Charles McDougall yelled “cut!” with Pierce sitting across from her, and he said aloud, if only to himself, “Oh, my.” He had chills. “She transformed in front of his eyes. He felt her greatness,” Julia creator Daniel Goldfarb recalls. As Pierce puts it now, “It was like she’d been doing it all her life.”
