(Photo by Jason Bell/Starz)
Nearly 500 years after his death, the fascination with English king Henry VIII’s Tudor dynasty and his wives and offspring doesn’t seem to be heading toward a standstill.
The past couple years alone have given us Amy Manson as the ghost of Henry’s most famous wife, Anne Boleyn, in the Princess Diana biopic Spencer, Jodie Turner-Smith portraying that same fallen queen in the eponymous AMC+ miniseries, and the hit musical Six that offers a modern retelling of all of Henry’s wives.
But what of the formative years of Henry’s three legitimate descendants, son Edward and daughters Mary and Elizabeth? The trio of half-siblings spent their early years as pawns as their father’s friends and frenemies jockeyed for power — often despite the safety and well-being of them or their mothers. This, no doubt, impacted how each of them reigned when they did successfully make it to the throne.
The new Starz miniseries, Becoming Elizabeth looks at the formative years of Henry’s most successful heiress: Queen Elizabeth I. Setting the story in her teen years in the aftermath of Henry’s death, it looks at how the then-princess (portrayed by Alicia von Rittberg, herself a German countess) came into her own to learn who she can trust while also allowing our ostensibly more worldly eyes to dissect the political and social minefield she had to walk.
(Photo by Nick Briggs/Starz)
Elizabeth was in her mid-teens when her father died and she relied heavily on her latest step-mother, Catherine Parr (portrayed by Jessica Raine), for guidance and lodging.
“I tried to develop a blind spot for Elizabeth as the queen we know because I wanted to not be influenced by something I do not know yet, as a character,” Von Rittberg says of the young monarch and what life had in store for her.
She says there was little research available on Elizabeth’s adolescence, so she practiced skills she knew she would probably have had learned, like horseback riding, playing the piano, and dancing. And she drew on her own memories of being a young girl falling in love for the first time.
(Photo by Nick Briggs/Starz)
Things became more complicated when Catherine married Thomas Seymour, Elizabeth’s half-brother’s uncle and who is depicted here by Downton Abbey’s Tom Cullen. He took a special interest in Catherine’s ward, most likely for his own political gain even if that wasn’t obvious to a naïve child.
“I used to think that in history, people had a more ruthless personality and people didn’t have the same kind of humanity that we have,” series creator and executive producer Anya Reiss tells Rotten Tomatoes. She says she was operating under the assumption that “now we’ve all evolved to this place where we care if someone cheats on us and we know that you shouldn’t use children and that you shouldn’t murder colleagues in the middle of London.”
But, after doing her research, she learned that “there are some truths that always remain true” and that “we get away with too much going like ‘Oh we’ve evolved to this point’ rather than realizing that things have always been this way, and people have always suffered the consequences of them.”
Executive producer George Ormond compares this relationship’s historical significance to his previous work on the Hulu miniseries National Treasure. That story is about a British actor (Robbie Coltrane’s Paul Finchley) who played a beloved TV character so well that it impacted how society saw him — especially after he was accused of multiple counts of rape.
In this story, Ormond says, “there’s no doubt that Thomas’s relationship with Elizabeth was really damaging for her and really influenced how she felt about people and how she viewed the relationships around her for her whole adult life.”
But also, he says, Thomas is “incredibly charming.”
“He’s very funny, he pays attention to her, he listened to her, he asked her questions about herself,” Ormond says. “And, in a world where she’s surrounded by people who are so obviously trying to use her for their political ends, I think that’s very appealing for her.”
(Photo by Starz)
Becoming Elizabeth creator Reiss laughs that there’s no way you can survive having Henry VIII as a father without the need of some intense therapy.
Both Mary (as portrayed by Romola Garai) and Edward (as portrayed by Oliver Zetterström) are part of this story, with Ormond pointing out that, especially because they all have different mothers, the siblings are “very much like a modern family, where they have to get along with each other, and they love each other and hate each other at the same time.”
During the show’s panel during the winter Television Critics Association press tour in February, von Rittberg said that Elizabeth’s relationship with her father was “too difficult to get it right, I guess.”
“Elizabeth was basically incredibly alone in this world and grew up without her mother, and I think her father gave her that last sense of security in a way,” the actress says now of how the princess must have felt upon the death of the man who ordered the killing of her mother, adding, “It’s a question of ‘Where do I belong?’ that suddenly pops up as well. And that can be incredibly scary when you’re that young.”
(Photo by Jason Bell/Starz)
Elizabeth isn’t the only young girl who gets caught up in the power plays of adult men. Unless you’re a fan of the early works of Cary Elwes and Helena Bonham Carter, Jane Grey (portrayed here by Game of Thrones’ Bella Ramsey) is now mostly a footnote in history thanks to her brief reign between Edward and Mary that came to a tragic end.
In Becoming Elizabeth, audiences see a timid and awkward Jane placed into Catherine Parr’s care by her own scheming relatives. Reiss said during the TCA panel that one of the fun things about researching this show is that she got to “do people’s stories before they hit the history books for being famous.”
“It’s all these bits of history that you never would really know because it’s thrown in a footnote later,” she said. “You have no idea where they came from, or that they were related to this person, or they knew that, or they’d seen this.”
Von Rittberg adds then that this “is basically a coming-of-age story set in a political drama, set in a family drama.”
(Photo by Starz)
History is often used as a setting for lust and romance as well as a contemporary look at politics (see also: The CW’s Reign and Showtime’s The Tudors). This doesn’t always mean everything you see on TV is historically accurate.
“History is an interpretation of a series of events, and this is Anya’s interpretation,” Cullen tells Rotten Tomatoes. “The show is historically accurate. Everything that happens in the show happened for real. But in some ways, I really felt that this show is a very contemporary look at at a young woman figuring out who she is.”
He adds that he believes our obsession with this time period is because with the Tudors, “life and death really sit on a very thin line.”
(Photo by Nick Briggs/Starz)
Reiss told journalists during TCA: “I don’t, really, as a rule believe in villains. I believe in people doing very bad things, but I’m not really interested in anyone being villains or heroes in this. I’m just interested in those real people and trying to make a world of that.”
Von Rittberg echoed that sentiment during the panel, saying that the show is meant to look “these untouchable figures from books and films, but making them palpable; making them so human that you understand how they grew up, how they were children, how they were raised, how they became these icons.”
81%
Becoming Elizabeth: Season 1
(2022)
premieres at 9 p.m., June 12 on Starz.
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In the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) dreamed of becoming a Jedi Knight (and he finally did in Return of the Jedi). Now, the veteran actor is suiting up again — this time to play a Templar Knight in History’s Knightfall.
The Templar Knights have as much mythology as the Jedis (and perhaps more given that they were, you know, real people). Knightfall explores the Templars’ battles against King Phillip IV of France in the 13th century. While Landry (Tom Cullen) and Talus (Hamill) were not historical figures, they’re the fictional knights leading the charge against Knightfall’s Philip (Ed Stoppard).
Ahead of season 2, Hamill, Cullen, and producer Aaron Helbing all helped Rotten Tomatoes outline the similarities and differences between the fictional Jedi Knights and the real Templars.
Knightfall returns Monday, March 27 at 10 p.m. on History.
(Photo by History)
If you’re looking to get fit, Tom Cullen, star of History’s Knightfall, has a suggestion for you: wear chain mail.
The actor stars as Landry, leader of the Knights Templar, in the newest scripted drama from the network home of Vikings — which meant wearing 50 pounds of armor nearly daily for the better part of a year.
“I didn’t want to weigh the costume early on, because otherwise it would just become a thing in my head. I have weighed it since and it has become a thing in my head,” Cullen, who played Lord Gillingham in Downton Abbey, told Rotten Tomatoes. “The costume weighed 50 pounds, which is a lot to be carrying for 14, 15 hours a day when you’re fighting and riding horses. My body changed shape. I went from fit and kind of slender to muscular and big, just from the fact that I was carrying this amount of weight, this heavy costume.
“I couldn’t even get on a horse when I first started,” he confessed. “I had to have a stepladder because I didn’t have the power in my legs to get over the horse. But by the end of the shoot, I was leaping and running and jumping on horses. It was intense.”
So if you want to “get swole,” try the Chain Mail Workout!
“It’s where you wear 50 pounds of chain mail for seven months, every day, 15 hours a day,” Cullen said. “That’s all you have to do. And you’ll end up [muscular]. I’ve had to go to my wardrobe and buy all new trousers because my ass is so big. Honestly, if you want an ass like Kim Kardashian, become a knight.”
(Photo by History)
Knightfall takes place in the 1300s and follows the Knights Templar as they hunt to recover the Holy Grail in the final days of their reign, ahead of their eventual downfall. The series was shot in Eastern Europe on a Prague backlot — “they built medieval Paris, they built a temple, a palace, streets, a market, a moat, castle walls, a church, shops, alleyways, a pub — it was extraordinary,” Cullen said. The show tackles the later days of the Knights Templar’s reign of power.
“They were such a fascinating, clandestine sect,” Cullen said. “That the myriad of lies and layers that they bathed themselves in — it’s very difficult to unpack all of that. It was fascinating to learn about them. It was a real educational process for me.”
While, like most people, Cullen had a working knowledge of the group, he learned a lot while simply researching for his role.
“One of the things that really stuck with me was that they invented to first bank,” he said. “They created the banking system, and they created the first checks. They became the wealthiest fighting force in the world. And they answered to no country, no king, no queen. They only answered to God and to the Pope. No borders. You could cash your money in France, and you could take it out in Jerusalem. They were kind of untouchable. Fascinating guys. The thing that really surprised me was the level of their power. You learn about how they were in the battlefield. They were extraordinary. They would never leave. Even if they were losing, they would never turn their back and run. They would basically only surrender when the last man had been killed. That level of bravery and intelligence is an extraordinary combination, I think.”
(Photo by History)
Cullen’s character, Landry, was taken in by the Knights Templar as a 10-year-old orphan.
“All he’s known is war, fighting, and God. When we first see him in episode 1, he’s a very brash young maverick knight who ultimately loses the Holy Grail and loses Acre, the last stronghold in the Holy Land, which is the one thing that he understands himself through. The series is set 15 years after that event, and we find him questioning everything about himself. He’s questioning his faith and his own identity. He’s a very contradictory, very complex character. He is lying to his brothers. He’s having an affair with a woman. But he is immensely loyal. He is maybe the most fearless, brave knight. Yet he is starting to discover his own humanity and his mortality. He is a very pious man and is still a very faithful man, yet he is starting to discover who he is outside of his brotherhood.”
Yes, that’s right — there’s still plenty of sex on this show about religious monks, and Landry’s dedication to the Knights Templar only wavers when his chastity vow is involved.
“He’s very faithful to her,” Cullen said. “He’s a one-woman kind of guy.”
Except he’s supposed to be a no-woman kind of guy.
Added Cullen, “He’s a very complex guy, which is the kind of guy I’m interested in watching.”
https://twitter.com/KnightfallShow/status/932664680421699584
The season will include major developments about Landry’s love — in the first episode, even — but his relationship will take a back seat to his main quest: to recover the Holy Grail.
“Landry goes on a pathological hunt to try and find the Grail, because I think that he entwines a lot of his own identity into that piece of pottery,” Cullen said. “I think that he hopes to find it not only to garner enough power to go back to the Holy Land, which is what he thinks that he should be doing, but also to return himself back to who he was — search for his identity before he became this very complex guy. What’s great is that on the way, we see his life fall apart, and as he discovers more about himself, he discovers more about the people around him and the lies that are entwined around his whole life and his whole existence.”
Knightfall premieres Wednesday, December 6 at 10 p.m. on History.
