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

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.