Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A new historical drama series follows a family of British aristocrats who defy societal expectations of marriage and how women should behave. It's titled Outrageous. The show is based on Mary Lovell's biography, The Mitford Girls. Set in the 1930s, these women's enjoyed a level of access, influence and wealth at a time when many others in their nation experienced poverty and political extremism was on the rise. In the series, we are introduced to Nancy Mitford, the eldest sister and narrator, Tom, her only brother, Diana Mitford, a married woman who fell in love with the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Unity Mitford, who became a special companion to Adolf Hitler, Jessica, the communist of the family, Pamela, the quiet one, and Deborah, the youngest sister. Outrageous streams on BritBox on Wednesday, June 18th and joining us to discuss the show is the writer, Sarah Williams. Sarah, nice to meet you.

Sarah Williams: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Also joining us is the actor Joanna Vanderham, who stars as Diana Mitford in the series. Hi, Joanna.

Joanna Vanderham: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Sarah, when did you first hear of the Mitford sisters?

Sarah Williams: Oh, a long, long time ago. They're pretty famous in the UK for being notorious bunch of wild characters, but I didn't know any of the detail. About 20 years ago, a new book came out which was full of the detail, a biography of the Mitford girls by Mary Lovell. A friend of mine gave me a copy because she knew I loved stories about outrageous women, I suppose, and untold stories.

I started to read it and I thought, "My God, there's so much drama here." This is a slam dunk, as you would say, for a TV show and a long-running kind of series. I put together a treatment. I thought, "Really, I've hit TV gold." I put it out to a few people. Nothing.

Alison Stewart: Oh, no.

Sarah Williams: Literally 20 years later, COVID happens, and a company that I worked with before on something else, Firebird, who make this, gave me a call and said, "Do you have anything bottom of the drawer that's been a passion project, you've never managed to get away." I said, "Funnily enough, there is something." This time, perhaps because where the world is now, it really took root. It had always been called The Mitford Sisters. Quite a dull title.

[laughter]

Sarah Williams: I suddenly thought, what we need is a title which is the feel of the show and the feel of these rebellious girls. We came up with Outrageous. It has been a really wild journey because here we are in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival. We've got billboards in Times Square. It seems to me a really wild ride that we've been on from something that I couldn't get arrested for 10 years ago. It's great.

Alison Stewart: When you were playing the role of Diana, how did you take on her status and her wealth? How did it shape the way you playing Diana, carried herself?

Joanna Vanderham: Oh, that's such a wonderful question. A lot of my research was based on images that were made of Diana because she was the first socialite. People were photographing her and talking about her, and so there were a lot of images for me to look at. One of the things that I noticed is that she has her eyelids sort of half closed. They're sort of halfway down her eyes. I started looking in the mirror and holding my eyelids like that. I realized that the only way that you can look-- you have to tilt your head up and look down your nose at everybody. It instantly got me into the physicality of Diana, where I thought, that's how she walks through life. It's this sort of, "I'm better than you."

Alison Stewart: Oh, that was scary. Just like the show.

Joanna Vanderham: Not you. Not you.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: I was like, oh, my gosh. She's an actress. Sarah, the show is obviously set in the '30s. What's unique about this particular time for women?

Sarah Williams: Oh, God. It was the beginning of something for women. Women had only just got the vote, really, in the late '20s, and in the '30s, they were beginning to get into all the professions. There was a feeling for women that anything was possible. We were, in Britain, watching a lot of kind of Katharine Hepburn movies as well, so on movies and in the papers, all the women's magazines were starting up. There was a real feeling of possibility for women. I'm sure that infected these girls. They felt times were changing. "We don't have to behave like our parents and our grandparents. We can do whatever we like."

Alison Stewart: Anything we like.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Joanna, Diana, when we first meet her in the first episode, she's married. She seems sort of meh about marriage.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: What are her views on marriage when you're playing her? What did she think about marriage?

Joanna Vanderham: Well, I think it's just jumping off what Sarah just said, I think the expectation, even though the '30s might have felt like it was full of possibility, the expectation on these sisters was that they were going to marry well into wealth and make heirs, and that was it. That was what was expected of them.

She had done that at a very young age. She'd married Bryan Guinness, very wealthy of the Guinness fortune. I think she had this realization of, "Is this it? Is this my whole--" because she was so young, she sort of thought, "Is this the rest of my life?" Then she meets Oswald Mosley, and he offers something completely different. She says, "I can't describe it. I can't quite explain it, but I just know in my heart that I'm meant to be with him." She sets the ball rolling for all the outrageous things that all the other sisters get up to.

Sarah Williams: I think that moment when she decides she's bored in her marriage, that's the key. She's got it all. She's got the wealthy husband, the two children, the heir and a spare, and she's really bored. She's still only in her mid-20s, isn't she?

Joanna Vanderham: They were all so intelligent. To sort of ask them to spend their lives just not doing anything, not having the conversations that would inspire and change, it just felt so unnatural for her. Getting to leave Byian and have a life with Mosley, I think it felt inspiring.

Sarah Williams: For good or bad, Mosley wanted to change the world. These girls had the same ambition. That wasn't allowed within their class, really, or their societal place, but that's what they wanted. A lot of them had that strong urge to make a better world.

Joanna Vanderham: They just disagreed on how it should be done.

Alison Stewart: A new historical drama follows the scandalous lives of the Mitford sisters. I'm speaking with writer Sarah Williams and actor Joanna Vanderham, who stars as Diana Mitford. They are joining us. The show will premiere on BritBox on Wednesday, June 18th. I wanted to ask you about the tone of the show. What was it going in? How did it change? I was curious about that.

Sarah Williams: Well, the sisters really set the tone themselves. They were incredibly close bunch of sisters who had their own sense of humor and their own way of speaking to each other. They were all well known as being witty. I think if you're one of a big family, you understand that humor is a kind of lingua franca of a big family. I knew it had to be funny. There were also have to be moments of deep drama and tragedy within it. You know what? That's my favorite kind of drama that can encompass both of those things. Sort of, I think laughter and heartbreak are actually pretty good--

Joanna Vanderham: You got to make them laugh before you can make them cry.

Sarah Williams: I love that. That came quite naturally, I think. It came very naturally to this group of actors playing the sisters. They almost immediately, wouldn't you say, formed a very close bond with each other.

Joanna Vanderham: Such a very close bond. It lends itself to the subtext of-- Sarah's writing is just world-class, but so much of it is also what's unsaid and the dynamics and the little glances that you have with your family. They are the only ones that know exactly what you're trying to say without any words. To be able to have that dynamic with girls that aren't my sisters so quickly, it felt like we could just hit the ground running.

They're all so intelligent, and I think that influences the tone of the show and the pace of, for example, the edit and the sound design, and the way it's been shot. As you say, it was really taking inspiration from the sisters and how quickly they think and how intelligent they are. It's got a pace to it that most period dramas don't.

Sarah Williams: It does, and that--

Alison Stewart: That's interesting. It does have an interesting pace.

Sarah Williams: That's partly because I've got six main characters.

Joanna Vanderham: Just so much to get through. [laughs]

Sarah Williams: There's no downtime. Every scene, every moment of every scene has to count. It's very pacey, it's very light on its feet. There's lots of story. We've also got a fabulous soundtrack composed by a very young composer called Sami Goldberg. She has done a gorgeous job on the music.

Joanna Vanderham: She has.

Sarah Williams: It feels very modern and very propulsive. You're really engaged by it.

Joanna Vanderham: Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because the narrator of the series is the eldest daughter, Nancy. People won't recognize her here. She plays Prudence on Bridgerton.

Sarah Williams: Yes, she does.

Alison Stewart: Why did you choose to tell it through her eyes?

Sarah Williams: Well, Nancy became later in-- well, she was already a novelist, but she became a best-selling novelist. Actually, I was just thinking today, a bit like Nora Ephron, everything is copy. She wrote a lot about her own family. It seemed to me she's also the eldest, so she was a good person to guide us through. She's also the most politically centrist.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Sarah Williams: I thought that would be quite an even-handed way of looking at a family of complete extremists. She narrates the story from a viewpoint later on from after the war. She can also tell us, with hindsight, it may not have been such a good idea for my parents, for example, to let Unity go and live in Germany while the--

Alison Stewart: Yes, you could say so. The exercises she does on the lawn. [laughs]

Sarah Williams: Yes, exactly. She was going to become badly infected by Nazism. Our narrator has the benefit of hindsight.

Alison Stewart: Joanna, part of the family dynamic is the conflicting politics in this family. Where do the Mitfords stand?

Joanna Vanderham: Overall?

Alison Stewart: Just generally. Just give our audience the overview.

Joanna Vanderham: Well, okay, so Diana does set the ball rolling when she falls in love with the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Her flag is firmly in that camp. She introduced Unity to Oswald Mosley and his book, and that set her on her path. She became, as you said, a companion of Adolf Hitler. Jessica then had a complete reaction to this and went in the opposite direction and decided that, actually, communism was the way to change the world for the better.

In future seasons, she moves to Spain to fight Franco and really, really gets stuck in into Communism. The interesting thing is that Sarah was just saying backstage that Marv actually becomes a very firm fascist as well.

Sarah Williams: A follower, yes. Whereas Farv is very anti-Hitler. That marriage is eventually threatened as well. There's something very relatable, I think, these days, about a family pulled apart by politics. I think we all know-- well, I don't know. Certainly, in Britain, we have some awkward family dinners going on these days because politics has become so polarized. I think most people will understand.

Alison Stewart: The series is called Outrageous. It's about the Mitford sisters. It's premiering on BritBox, Wednesday, June 18th. My guests have been Sarah Williams and actor Joanna Vanderham. It was a pleasure to have you in the studio.

Sarah Williams: Thank you very much

Joanna Vanderham: Thank you so much.

Sarah Williams: Thank you.