LOS ANGELES, April 17 (US): “The First Lady” presents three influential women, three acclaimed playing actresses, and a century of history encompassing wars, presidential scandals, and fault lines between gender and race in America.
Showtime’s ambitious drama series has proven to be an irresistible challenge to Academy Award-winning director Suzanne Bier. Pierre said of her first biographical project that while her subjects – Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford and Michelle Obama – have a “compelling and engaging” story, the sum is greater than that.
“It was interesting to me that it wasn’t a single movie” by focusing on First Ladies from disparate experiences and eras “in a way that puts the position of women in the world in a very big perspective,” Pierre said in an interview.
“First Lady” stars Gillian Anderson as Eleanor Roosevelt, Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford and Viola Davis as Michelle Obama. Davis was an executive producer for the series, as were models Kathy Schulman and Pierre, the Associated Press reports.
In their younger iterations, Elisa Scanlin (Roosevelt), Kristen Frosyth (Ford), and Jimmy Lawson (Obama) played the future First Ladies. Kiefer Sutherland portrays presidents – after their wives in this novel – as Franklin D. Roosevelt; Aaron Eckhart as Gerald Ford; and OT Fagbenle as Barack Obama.
Shulman said the series examines the personal and political chapters, but it’s from historical fiction and doesn’t pretend to be a documentary. “We had to imagine what happened between the events and the things that were written about them,” she said during a panel discussion.
Pierre said the role of the first lady does not exist in her native Denmark. While she was familiar with the women portrayed in the series, she gained a newfound respect for them.
“What was amazing to me was the fact that they realized how to navigate the White House without actually having a political position, and they became more influential than one would have imagined,” she said. They did so while they managed to serve the expected role of America’s “good looking and successful” number one hostess.
Betty Ford has been open about her breast cancer “at a time when it was such a severe stigma and no one talked about it,” said Pierre. “It obviously saved a lot of people’s lives” and changed attitudes in the United States and other countries as well.
The First Lady takes on the stories as a tapestry, weaving together moments that show, at times, how similar the women’s experience is despite the decades separating them.
Everyone has struggled to be taken seriously as First Ladies after spending part or a large portion of their lives supporting their husbands’ ambitions. Ford and Obama are portrayed as deeply reluctant to make the White House their temporary home – Ford because she spent so much time in the political trenches after she gave up on her dreams, and Obama because she feared for her husband’s safety as the first black president.
Although decades have passed, there are striking similarities in the walls “which these three women beat against,” Pierre said. “Yes, our society has changed, history has changed. But it’s still very much the man’s world we live in, which is a way I find it very important to do (like) this show.”
The similarities involving the women are strictly objective because their lives do not overlap in history or in the series. Pierre, who joined the painting after defining the approach, felt that the arc of the individual stories of the women was not fully developed in the text.
With the first lady’s three scenes filmed independently, Pierre suggested creating a “coherent script for each.” Until then, changes were made along the way, with Ford and then Obama and Roosevelt being photographed one by one.
“While we were filming Betty, Michelle Obama’s scripts were being rewritten,” she said. “So there wasn’t really a complete roadmap for how to weave the stories.”
Pierre, who won the Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2011 for “Hævnen (In a Better World”), said it was during liberation in London that he won an Emmy for 2016’s The Night Manager and other credits include “The Undoing” and “Birdbox”.
Producer Shulman said Bear, the “leading director” in various genres, was a good fit for the Showtime series that “is in and out of comedy, tragedy, and everything in between.” “Susan is also an actress and director, and the level of detail with which she handled the characterizations was crucial to bringing the First Ladies to life.”
“The First Lady” is seen as an ongoing anthology series, with new Presidential Husbands as part of future editions. Among the possibilities that Shulman and Beer found interesting: Dolly Madison, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton.
“I am currently obsessed with Martha Washington,” Shulman said during the panel discussion, citing her intrigues with the origins of the role of first lady. “But I would also be very interested to see if we can figure out a way to make Jackie Kennedy that doesn’t tell the same old story. … Each of them are very interesting, and they get even more interesting in combinations.”