SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from the three-episode premiere of “The New Look,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
In the opening episodes of Apple TV+’s new series “The New Look,” famed fashion icons Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, who stand at two very different points in their celebrated careers, writhe and struggle within the militarized and moral confines of Nazi-occupied Paris.
In the French capital, the dangers are muted for those who have value to the Nazi cause. Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) is reluctantly enlisted to create ball gowns for the wives of Nazi officers, and Chanel (Juliette Binoche) finds herself drawn to the privileges –– and safety –– of being in the enemy’s good graces. But for those who resist the brutal occupying force, they face the inhumanity of the Nazi agenda firsthand. That’s where the three-episode premiere finds Catherine Dior (Maisie Williams), the younger sister and original muse of Christian, who is a prominent figure in the city’s covert French Resistance alongside her boyfriend, Hervé (Hugo Becker).
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At the end of the first episode, set in 1944, Catherine is arrested and taken to The House, a Nazi detention center where she is pressed by the Gestapo to name her co-conspirators. Eventually, that pressure becomes outright torture, but she remains resolute in her silence. In time, she is sent to a prison camp –– all while Christian and his boss Lucien Lelong (John Malkovich) desperately try and fail to broker a deal to intercept her en route. Joining Catherine’s story right in the middle of one of its most traumatic chapters tested Williams from her first days on “The New Look.”
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“We launch right in at this monumental part of her life, but I think it is something she has always been mentally prepared for,” Williams tells Variety. “Being part of the French resistance was hugely dangerous, and Catherine, at the time, was going against her brother’s wishes and doing what she felt was right. I think for me, reading those first three episodes and realizing we were starting there, gave me the insight to start thinking about how she then might change and then might return.”
Interspersed throughout the second and third episodes are scenes of Catherine not only enduring torture, but also being moved on a crowded train car to the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women in Germany. After being marched into the camp, she and the others are forced to undress, toss their tattered clothes into a pile and then sit for their heads to be shaved. In the all-too-familiar scene, the camera holds tight on Williams’ face as Catherine, just one of hundreds waiting for the same treatment, is stripped of her identity.
In signing up for the role, Williams agreed to have her head shaved not only for the series, but also on camera.
“I had cut my hair short at the time, so some of the overwhelming part of that was gone before we did it,” she says. “But the women in these camps having their heads shaved, although we now look back and see how degrading and dehumanizing that was, I think of all the things that happened to them in the camps, it was probably one of the easiest moments. I guess for myself, kind of diving into Catherine’s psyche, I felt like it was a moment for her to prepare for what could come next.”
But Williams is candid that going that deep to understand Catherine while also seeing a physical transformation in herself was something to which she had to adjust.
“For me, getting used to my head being shaved wasn’t the most seamless, fun experience,” she says. “But it felt like it was bringing me closer to doing Catherine justice.”
The show shot in Paris, with the production recreating a number of places important to its legendary fashion magnates, specifically Dior’s apartment and his fashion house. But some of the most immersive sets for Williams were the ones Catherine unexpectedly finds herself in, like the entrance outside of Ravensbrück.
Having cut her teeth in “Game of Thrones,” one of the most sprawling productions in history, Williams says the severity of World War II was a harder world to crack.
“I have done a lot of things where the world is fictional, and I feel like escaping into something like that can be easier, because it is all part of the imagination,” she says. “But when you are depicting something that is history and familiar to the public conscious, on sets like this, it can be hard to kind of escape and lose yourself in that. Being in Paris and being on these incredible sets that were built as direct replicas of Dior’s apartment or even his fashion house, it really just added to the role — and what I found within Catherine.”
Before filming began, Williams says she mainlined everything she could about Catherine’s story, even though the real woman held it close to her chest. She never spoke publicly about her experiences during the war, but Williams says she got lost in books like “Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture” by Justine Picardie that focus on Catherine’s story through those women she encountered during the war.
While the first three episodes are harrowing for Catherine, the rest of the series will find her staring down the odds of survival. In speaking about her relationship with the character of Catherine, Williams repeatedly lands on the same word.
“‘Resilient’ is probably the most apt word we can use to describe who Catherine was,” Williams says. “Anyone who knew her who I have spoken to has said a similar thing. We, myself included, now project this image onto this woman that she was a beacon of hope for Dior, and she became the first muse of Dior. The Miss Dior as we know today. We think of this incredibly beautiful and strong woman who defeats the odds. But I think in the series, what we see is that she is not someone who wanted glory, or even wanted to be seen as a beacon of hope. I think she was just trying to do the right thing with the tools that she had, and she was going to stop at nothing in her life to stand by her country and stand by her people.”