After years charting the upstairs/downstairs drama at Downton Abbey, creator Julian Fellowes moves Stateside for another glitzy period melodrama—starring Louisa Jacobson as a penniless ingenue who’s thrust abruptly into Fifth Avenue society. While Jacobson says she’s facing “a huge learning curve” in her TV debut, the youngest daughter in a family of artists (her parents are Meryl Streep and sculptor Don Gummer; her sisters are actors; her brother’s a musician) is determined to do things her own way.
SHE SPENT childhood summers at theater camp and did drama in high school. But upon arriving at Vassar College, she “chose to bury my desire to act. I needed to prove to myself, my family, and my peers that somehow I was different.” Jacobson majored in psychology with an art history minor but still performed with friends in empty lecture halls.
UPON GRADUATION, she pursued jobs in retail and advertising, and started auditioning for plays during lunch breaks—“I was tired of telling myself I’m not allowed to.” Then she applied to Yale Drama and got in.
A HUGE FAN of Downton Abbey, Jacobson had a Sunday ritual of watching the show with a friend, comedian Tracey Ullman. “We just ordered lots of Indian food and drank red wine and ate chocolate.”
TO PREPARE for the role, Jacobson wore a corset around her apartment (“Peeing was really hard. I tried to sneeze and it imploded!”) and read Edith Wharton in era-appropriate buildings like the New York Public Library.
HER COSTARS are a who’s who of Broadway: Cynthia Nixon, Carrie Coon, Audra McDonald, Bill Irwin, and Christine Baranski.
HER MOST MEMORABLE moment was filming at the Breakers, the historic Vanderbilt mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. “I feel like I went back in time. All of us in our gowns, leaving the home like it must have been—then I got into a van, and they opened the door and were like, ‘Can you actually get out? This is Julian’s van.’ ”
SHE ADMITS she’s a lot like her character Marian, who “doesn’t want her life handed to her. She wants to pave her own path. She’s a person who doesn’t let the shiny exterior fool her.”
HAIR, JENNY KIM; MAKEUP, INGEBORG; SET DESIGN, COLIN PHELAN. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY PREISS CREATIVE. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.
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