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Where's The Remote?
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It's Still Good to be King
Last year, Kirsten Dunst tried to re-invent the persona of Marie Antoinette on the big screen. Now comes Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ shot at rock’n roll royalty via the new Showtime series The Tudors.
Friday, March 30, 2007 at 5:40 PM
By Shelley Gabert
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Showtime
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From Graceland to King's country
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Tudor England is hot right now.
Last year, we were feted with the glorious Helen Mirren in Elizabeth on HBO and The Queen, and currently in production is the feature film The Other Boleyn Sister, based on the Phillipa Gregory novel about the competitive relationship between the two Boleyn sisters, Mary and Anne.
The man who garnered a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination for The Queen’s screenplay, Peter Morgan, is the author of the Boleyn drama, and with British accent capable actresses Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson filling out the corsets of Anne and Mary, this Christmas 2007 release should continue Morgan’s incredible recent run. Of course it doesn’t hurt to also have Eric Bana as King Henry VIII, the father who is the object of much of the sisters’ machinations.
The love-hate relationship between the King and daughter Anne has been covered before, by everyone from the Royal Shakespeare Company to Masterpiece Theater. Even so, Showtime's The Tudors, a ten-episode series that premieres on Sunday at 10:00 p.m. PT, brings something new and fresh to the story, namely Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
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Showtime
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Ann Boleyn (Natalie Dormer)
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He also won a Golden Globe this year for playing the King of rock’n roll, so it seems only natural for him to now segue to King Henry VIII. Doubly so when you consider the fact that Showtime, in the series promos, is describing KH8 as the rock star of his time.
"With Elvis, I really had to stick to what Elvis was,” Rhys Meyers explains during a conference call that dialed in FilmStew. “And with Henry the VIII, I could play him how I want him to be. It’s how I see Henry." E.g., as a young, dashing and passionate man who's athletic, rides horses and beds a lot of women.
Still, this King is also desperate to be a good leader and a leave a long-lasting historical legacy. Shot entirely in Ireland, The Tudors feels almost contemporary, which Rhys Meyers says is deliberate. The goal was very much to avoid try and steer clear of big, layered costumes and mannered actions and dialogue.
"We have to get the audience interested in the time and have to be attractive to an audience,” the 29-year-old Dublin native insists. “Because otherwise, it’s going appear very stiff and that’s the problem with doing things in the period. If you get too into the period, it gets stiff and not vital.”
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Showtime
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Cardinal Wolsey (Sam Neill)
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According to creator and writer Michael Hurst, who also wrote the screenplay for the Cate Blanchett movie Elizabeth, 80% of the storylines are historically accurate. The series covers ten years in the King's life, leading up to his divorce from Queen Katherine of Aragon (Maria Doyle Kennedy). There's still the scheming Cardinal Wolsey (Sam Neill), his mentor Sir Thomas More (Jeremy Northram) and the manipulative but seductive Anne (Natalie Dormer).
Purists will no doubt object to the way the storyline with the King's sister, Margaret (Gabrielle Anwar), has been altered, as well as perhaps the notion of casting the slight-of-build Rhys Meyers and giving him free reign to create the character.
"I had total say on how the character was going to be played,” Rhys Meyers reveals. “You know, when Michael wrote us and when he taught us, he said, 'This is yours. You can do what you want with it. I've already given you the text. What you bring out as Henry is very, very much your own. I will help you as much as possible.'”
“He was like, 'I'm not the actor. You’re the actor,’” he adds. “Woody [Allen] was the same when I did Match Point. He was like, 'Do whatever you want to do. You’re the actor. It’s yours.'"
While the Showtime rendition might not be everyone's cup of tea, it's undeniably a feast for the eyes. And Rhys Meyers does convey the spirit of Henry, in that he had oversized appetites for everything.
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Showtime
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Princess Margaret (Gabrielle Anwar)
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"I based him on what I would do myself if I had absolute power at 28, 29 years old,” Rhys Meyers explains. “I didn’t have the physicality of Henry, you know? And so I had to do it all internally. I had to create this incredibly strong, powerful man without being sort of like 6’ 4" and 300 pounds.”
“I had to make his intellect bigger than anybody else’s,” he continues. “I had to make his ambition bigger than anybody else’s. I had to make his energy bigger than anybody else’s. And I had to make him the most dangerous man in court."
Both Rhys Meyers and Hirst admit they were well aware during production of the prodigious Henry VIII’s put forth by Keith Mitchell, Charles Laughton and Richard Burton. "We didn’t want to redo something that’s was already done,” says Rhys Meyers. “It’s my interpretation, not imitating anybody else as Henry. It’s my interpretation of what it would be like to 29 years old, athletic and have absolute power to do whatever you want. And I must say it's nice being king."
“We also wanted to give it a vibrancy, a youthful impetuousness, an energy,” he exclaims. “Because there’s a long way to go in Henry’s story. In the first season he hasn’t even married Anne Boleyn. He’s got a very, very long way to travel, so we wanted to start it young so it could grow as the characters grow in age as well."
In this day and age of Method acting, Rhys Meyers says he didn’t do much research for the role, as Hirst wanted him to basically take his cue from text custom-tailored to the actor’s style. “I prefer to stick to Henry in the now,” Rhys Meyers says. “I want people to love to hate him. I mean, he’s a bastard, but he’s an interesting bastard. And, you know, through the costumes and the way they lit it, they made him an attractive bastard. Nobody’s going to be interested in the good guy for ten hours."
"The King is also intellectual, zealous, aggressive, insecure, vulnerable -- all of these things,” he marvels. “And yes, of course he’s got an unnatural arrogance. But anybody who’s been ordained by God and owns their own country has a certain amount of arrogance that comes with that."
This King is also a much more sexual Henry, enjoying love scenes that are more playful, lust driven and frequent. For that, the series has taken some advance hits, which seems to confound Rhys Meyers.
"Remember, there’s no TV,” he says. “Sex was very, very important. It’s what you did when the sun went down. I’ve had some people who’ve been like, 'Oh my God, he got a blow job!’ And I'm like, ‘They had blow jobs back in that time as well.' I mean they were much more sexually gregarious in the 15th century than they are today."
| Indeed, Henry's court seems very modern day Hollywood. And since he is the biggest celebrity of his time, he has his hangers on and his own entourage, ready at any time to seize the perks of being in that inner circle. All in all, his posse often acts like Vince and his boys on HBO's Entourage, only most of them are getting a lot more sex and display even more of a sense of entitlement when it comes to taking what they want.
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“Henry’s court at the time was the fastest court in the world,” Rhys Meyers observes. “If you weren’t in Henry’s court, you were nobody. It was the be all and end all; the place to be; the Mecca of learning, the Mecca of style, the Mecca of fashion. It was the Mecca of entertainment. Everything happened around his court."
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