When you think of Christian Dior, likely, your first thought is fashion. And while Apple TV+’s new show ‘The New Look‘ does follow the career of the noteworthy designer, it also opens to the door to a lot more that happened in Dior’s life, specifically during the Nazis’ occupation of France in WWII.
Dior is played by Ben Mendelsohn, and the actor was drawn to the role through learning a bit about who Dior was, but more so, who he wasn’t. The show also goes in to the story of fashion designer Coco Chanel (played by Juliette Binoche) and Dior’s sister Catherine (played by Maisie Williams), and we get to see lesser-known stories that not only cover the creative side of its subjects, but the resilient ones as well.
Mendelsohn recently sat down with Metro to talk more.
What immediately stood out to you about this project and made you want to sign on?
The first thing I heard about was Christian’s unresolved feelings about his authentic self versus his public self…That immediately captivated me. And in fact, that’s all [that was] said, and I said, when do we do it? So that was the hook and the rest of it sort of came after. That was five or six years ago now, seven years even. And I waited for five years holding on, hoping we were going to get to do it.
I know that a ton of research went into filming through every detail in creating the show, but what did you yourself to prepare?
I wanted to know the family and rough outline of life. I watched the interviews and the footage that I could of him, because if you can get footage of someone that’s just gold. And other than that, I didn’t want to know anything because I wanted the words on the page and my understanding of what was going on to inform the rest of it. I don’t buy the orthodoxy of the standard ideas of how you act. I think it’s a stage thing and it’s really in response to checkoff.
A lot of the scenes in the show were filmed where the events actually happened and where people like Dior and Chanel frequented. Did that add an extra layer to the experience for you acting-wise?
It’s more being in Paris and being able to remain in Paris. When we go to the actual places, I don’t have that sort of phasing thing going on because it’s not such a big deal to me, what’s the big deal to me is to remain in the cultural kind of the place where he was. The specific places I don’t get too fussed about because I know how far it’s going to be from whatever we are doing.
Whenever you’re doing something, it’s always an extrapolation, but what I’m concentrating on is making sure that I’m writing the love letter that I discover throughout, and the one that I want to write to him. That’s what I’m trying to do, is just send him a love letter saying, I love you. I think you are awesome. And I think all your feelings and what you have to go through was awesome, and here’s my version.
I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know the half of what he went through during that time.
I knew nothing, I don’t think you’ll find anyone who knows. That’s the joke of this thing. These are the sort of Titanic brands that we go around adopting or rejecting, and they’ve become symbiotic. And really, it’s a story to me about taking your broken self through a broken hostile world and trying to face a bunch of really difficult events and having your hopes of what you might be able to do somewhere in there and having calamity and not being able to affect that…And then still just coming out with something at the end where you’ve still got heart, where you can still contribute and in fact change the world, but not being in any way a particularly heroic person in the classical sense that we understand.
It was interesting because I didn’t realize that a show about a fashion designer would teach me so much about resilience.
I think that’s the joy of it. We’re not making a show about fashion. We’re not making a show about Cocoa or Dior particularly. We are making a show about resilience. We are making a show about how do you be in this world? And it’s in this milieu. But when he told me the first thing about [Christian], was I hate the way I am in the [social] world, I wish I could be more like I am and more myself. That’s the hook for me, that was the thing, because I think we all get some version of that in some way. And then when he added in the layers and I watched him, I was like, oh mate, you are just, wow. I understood how much of a shyness and certainty he had and how much shame and confidence, and all of the polarity of him and the horrible, intense, horrible thing that they went through.
Catch new episodes of ‘The New Look’ every Wednesday on Apple TV+
