LONDON.- Hundreds of years ago, Mary Villiers knew how to use her son to obtain wealth, power and prestige. In Mary & George, Julianne Moore She plays a mother who took advantage of her son George’s charms to gain favor at the court of King James I in 17th century England.
People who do that use their children as objects, right? They are living vicariously through them, Moore said. She sees in George what she would like, a kind of access to the world. You know, he’s a man, he’s handsome, he’s charming. And she truly believes that that’s how you succeed. She sees a way forward. She has a way to the top.
Advertised as a drama psychosexual, the serie The seven-episode vintage will premiere on Sky in the UK on March 5 and arrive in the US and Canada on Friday on Starz.
Based on the book by Benjamin Woolley, the plot follows Villiers, a real-life person who educates his son in conversation, music and seduction to conquer the monarch. Amid screens and lute notes, court life with corsets and voluptuous bodies has real poison and poisonous rumors that can ruin lives, reputations or both.
Moore and Nicholas Galitzine, who plays George, spoke with The Associated Press about how this duo set out to captivate the crown in Mary & Georgewhile admitting that they probably would not have succeeded in the Jacobin era as well as their real-life counterparts.
How do you imagine they would have lived in that time and in that society?
Moore: I don’t know if I’m as inventive as Mary Villiers was, you know? She is someone who took advantage of every opportunity and lived in a place that, as a woman, had a relatively low status. So she only had agency through her marriages and children. What she did was really crazy, I could have failed and died.
Galitzine: I think most of us would feel the same way. That’s what makes the story unique, we are not those people who have that practical intelligence and who want to ascend that way. So yes, he would probably die of some horrible disease.
Your character, George, is an Lgbtq cone.
Galitzine: It exists, yes, as an icon. And I hope it continues to be so after the series comes out. That was a really interesting thing to discover. This being the 1600s, you know, you might question its relevance today. But it’s actually mentioned in the book of a movie I made, Red, White & Royal Blue, which is kind of a really interesting link between the two. So that was personally very gratifying.
We must talk about Julianne’s accent, which she did perfectly.
Moore: Thank you. I had a wonderful coach named Majella Hurley, who was there with me every day. I got very attached to her. We would see each other on the weekends, do the work of the week, and then she would be there and listen to me. I listened to people on the street, to my coworkers, and I, you know… lived in a state of abject terror, thinking I was wrong and waiting for someone to tell me if I was wrong.
Also includes swearing with an English accent.
Galitzine: I think it’s a little better than swearing in an American accent, maybe. I think we do a little better, if I’m honest.
Many of the reviews mention ‘sexy’ and ‘swear words’. How do you approach production when there are many sex scenes?
Galitzine: Well, it’s funny, with our director Oliver Hermanus, we went out to dinner before we started and he told me: ‘there are a lot of sex scenes. Do you definitely agree with this?’ Luckily, it’s something I’ve done over the years, and I think you let go of your own anxieties the moment they say action.
If you’ve researched your character, if you’ve fully invested in who they are and who they need to be on screen, someone like George, who carries this poise with him, you can become a different person in those moments. And you don’t feel the concern of all these strange people watching you. So I don’t want to say that he was easy or that I felt comfortable, necessarily. But we had an incredible cast and crew and the scenes were handled very well by intimacy coordinator Robbie Taylor Hunt. And I think they’re shot in a particularly beautiful way, both Julie’s and mine, which I’m very proud of.
FUENTE: AP
