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| In 'The White Queen,' the royalty gets medieval |
It's not just about royals behaving badly; it's about royals throwing out every rule in the Good Book they claim to follow. It's royals lying and scheming, stealing and torturing, loving and hating. It's about blood, lust and tears, all in the same family.
You think the Windsors and the fictional Lannisters had their problems? Meet the Plantagenets and Tudors, Yorks and Lancasters, the royal cousins whose struggle for the throne soaked England in blood in the second half of the 15th century.
"Men go to battle. Women wage war," reads the tagline for the 10-part series (which also airs Saturday), a British production filmed in the gloriously antique canal city of Bruges across the channel in northern Belgium.
Queen stars Swedish-born beauty Rebecca Ferguson, 29, as the title character, Elizabeth Woodville, and Max Irons (son of Jeremy) playing her king, the impulsively lustful Edward IV.
"The exercise of power by men is a familiar story, (but) women have to exercise it in their own individual and subtle ways," says Philippa Gregory, the English historian whose best-selling novels about the women of The Cousins' War (The White Queen, The Red Queen and The Kingmaker's Daughter) were adapted as the basis for the series.
As with earlier pay-cable British costume dramas (The Tudors and The Borgias), this series has lots of sex and nudity and deals with such topics as incest and rape, child marriage, child pregnancy and child murder, torture and taxes and near-constant warfare, plus plague and a dash of witchcraft.
"Getting (naked) in front of loads of people is always nerve-wracking and embarrassing the first time you have to do it,"says a laughing Irons, 28, in a phone interview from London.
So how much of The White Queen is true? Quite a lot. But as usual, British viewers have gleefully pointed out language and costume anachronisms, such as a few stray zippers on the clothes.
Gregory is unperturbed. "There are thousands of costumes, and these had to be made in modern fabrics and dyed in modern colors, but they look fantastic and authentic if you're not peering trying to find a zipper," she says.
Max Irons, Rebecca Ferguson 'The White Queen'
Max Irons as Edward IV and Rebecca Ferguson as his queen in 'The White Queen' on Starz, starting Aug. 10.(Photo: Starz)
Besides, an absolutely accurate adaptation is not necessarily the best approach, even if full documentation of the medieval period were available.
"A really good movie is going to have different criteria (from a novel or a work of history)," she says. "You're always bound to feel ambivalent but I really, really like what's been done with it."
Gregory's mission and that of the series is to highlight the compelling stories of medieval royal women who led dramatic, shocking, tragic lives — suitable for cable TV — that even the British know only vaguely, never mind the Yanks.
There's Elizabeth Woodville, the beautiful "commoner" from a Lancaster family who snags the York king when he spots her on the side of a road as he rides past. There's her "frenemy" Lady Margaret Beaufort (Amanda Hale), a Lancastrian heir driven to madness, fanaticism and paranoia by her horrifying childhood (forced pregnancy at 13), who plots to put her own son on the throne.
There's Elizabeth's sister-in-law, Lady Anne Neville (Faye Marsay), daughter of the "kingmaker" Earl of Warwick (James Frain of The Tudors), who becomes the Princess of Wales and eventually queen but ends up her father's pawn and another victim of The Cousins' War. Plus, Oscar nominee Janet McTeer plays Elizabeth's French mother, Jacquetta Woodville, a politically savvy survivor who believed herself to be a spell-casting descendant of a river goddess.
