For most of his six-decade-long film and television career, actor Michael Douglas has played a lot of straight, white American men in contemporary settings. Casting an eye down his filmography, there are no princes, palace courtiers or spacemen to speak of.

“I don’t think [the apparent lack of variety] ever affected me,” the 79-year-old New Jersey-born actor says. “It’s really been my choice and my call, and I’ve just been so focused on how it turned out, without thinking about it. I just realised my entire career was contemporary.”

And then along came Behind the Candelabra, the critically acclaimed film in which Douglas played the celebrated showman Liberace. “Liberace’s life was a real period piece, so I wanted to do something before it was all over in that vein,” Douglas says. And now he’s ventured further back, playing American founding father Benjamin Franklin, eponymous star of Franklin.

Franklin’s life – in particular his mission to France to secure support for the then-fledgling American democratic experiment – was just the kind of period piece the very contemporary Douglas was hungry for. But there was little to see of the man, outside historical paintings and his face on the American $100 bill.

Douglas tested the role with prosthetics on his face to tweak his appearance, but ultimately decided to keep the performance – and his face – simple. “Liberace was a two-hour movie and in playing that character, [prosthetics] worked for eight hours. We shot 160-plus days on Franklin,” Douglas says, by way of comparison.

In full period costume, but without prosthetics, the man in the makeup mirror didn’t look too different to the real Douglas. But it unexpectedly helped him capture the essential truth of the man. “Early in my career somebody told me, the camera can always tell when you’re lying,” he says.

“I remember doing Fatal Attraction, and they said, OK, he’s a lawyer, and I thought, I could be a lawyer; he lives in New York, yeah, I live in New York; oh, and he’s an adulterer. Well, I could be an adulterer. And then I guess it came upon me, I said, wait a minute, I could be this guy, I could be this guy.

“So there are two ways you can go with characters,” Douglas says. “There’s a Liberace, which is like you’re putting on the makeup, and you’re creating the character, which is fun, or the scary one, when you just use more of your persona and adjust that persona to be the part.

“Being a celebrity made it easier to play Ben Franklin because you see how you conduct yourself in a world with the public, and you learned, over the years, how to make other people feel comfortable in situations,” Douglas adds.

There has likely never been a moment in Michael Douglas’ life when he has not lived with fame. His father was the legendary screen actor Kirk Douglas. And when he was not starring in films like The China Syndrome, Jewel of the Nile and Fatal Attraction, he was producing others, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“There is the phenomena [of fame], particularly about the mystery, you don’t expose too much because then they’re not going to want to see you on the screen,” Douglas says. And yet, he owes much of his success to the ubiquity of TV, and the fame it gave him, as the 28-year-old star of The Streets of San Francisco between 1972 and 1975.

“It was all over the world, it was amazing,” Douglas says of his early TV fame. “It gave you this huge exposure, which I’m realising now, was just part of the carry-over where people have known you for so long and gone through so much with you, they really know you.”

The miniseries Franklin is based on Stacy Schiff’s 2005 book, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. It came to Douglas with two key bonuses: it was to be produced by former HBO executive Richard Plepler, who he knew, and directed by Tim Van Patten, who he was assured was “the sweetest man”.

“You reach a point in your career where you’re not going to put up with it. This is not surgery, this is entertainment.”

“I don’t work well under tension, I don’t think anybody really does,” Douglas says. “Although there are some people, out of insecurity I guess, who create it. I always try to make an environment as comfortable as possible. It makes it a job to go to work in the morning.”

He recently summed it up with this: “I don’t work with dickheads.” It’s blunt, but it offers the clearest glimpse of just who Douglas is willing to let into the room. “In the last 60 years that has not always been the case,” he adds. “You reach a point in your career where you’re not going to put up with it. This is not surgery, this is entertainment.”

The series also steps into the question of American identity, at a time when geopolitics has placed the country at a cultural and political crossroads. A presidential election is just 200-odd days away, party politics is at a toxic low and the idea of “patriotism” has become a cultural tug-of-war.

“This country, how it was created, how it succeeded after wars ... it was a belief, a concept,” Douglas says. “Where some people have religions, [democracy] was an idea which is definitely lost. [Some people] talk about being a patriot, a patriot is supportive of democracy.

“Why this show is resonating with a lot of people, with this particular year of our elections, and in a lot of other countries, it’s so important,” Douglas adds. “To realise how vulnerable democracy is, how it has to be managed, how constantly, it’s exhausting work.

“Autocracies are much easier. Democracy is imagination. It’s creativity,” Douglas says. “It’s hard work creating something fresh and new, but at the same time it seems to be very attractive to a lot of people and a tremendous amount of ingenuity comes out of it.”

In many ways Douglas is a smoother mesh into the character of Benjamin Franklin than perhaps he even realises. Franklin was noted for his diplomacy. Aside from the frankness of his choice of words, it’s hard to imagine Douglas as a charmless man. And Franklin was a shrewd seducer. Douglas, with his winsome smile, has you at “hello”.

Franklin, who says in one of the series’ early scenes, “You are what the role requires you to be”, followed a natural, self-driven destiny, but also stepped up to play a part when nobody else would or could. “He’s a little bit of both,” Douglas agrees.

“We have a brilliant man, there’s no question about his brilliance, totally uneducated, two years of school, left at 12,” he says. “And yet, he created the University of Pennsylvania, he created our libraries, he created our postal system, all of this. And he was an inventor.

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“And there he was, at 70, working on the Declaration of Independence with his fellow countrymen,” Douglas adds. “They signed it in 1776 and six weeks later they asked him to sail … across the Atlantic to persuade the king of France, a monarchy, to support this new democracy. It’s an impossible job.”

Critically, Douglas says, Franklin was a master seducer. “He liked his ladies, he loved to talk, he was a good conversationalist, had a great sense of humour and dry wit,” Douglas says. “So he turns that ability and power into seducing the French government, as well as a few ladies along the way.”

And his humility, Douglas adds, offers an unexpected glimpse into his ego. “He knew he was a famous man, so rather than trying to be overpowering he chose to be humble, dressed very simply. But it was a performance. He was very wily. And just another aspect of his brilliance.”

And the guy in the mirror? “I’m happy with that person,” Douglas says.

Franklin streams on Apple TV+ from April 12.