The Creation of Anne Boleyn (35 page)

None of these actresses brought anything to their roles that suggested the strength of character that Bujold brought to her Anne, perhaps due to the lack of directorial vision and guidance. The 1970 BBC miniseries was different. From the start, the creators were committed to the then-innovative conception of a Henry modeled on history rather than either the boorish caricatures of Emil Jannings and Charles Laughton or the tormented egotist of
Anne of the Thousand Days.
Long before Jonathan Rhys Meyers appeared on the scene, the BBC series broke new ground by showing the young Henry “as an excellent scholar who spoke four languages other than his native tongue . . . a student of mathematics and astronomy, a gifted musician, and a superb athlete . . . most likely England’s first civilised king.”
²
The first episode, “Katherine,” was a revelation for many viewers. In the story people were used to, Katherine is the rejected and ultimately discarded wife. In this episode, we see her young and eager, chasing through the castle and tumbling under the sheets with an equally young, ardent Henry. When things begin to go wrong, she is less a piously downtrodden wife than a stubborn defender of her (and her daughter’s) rights. This was also the first and last Katherine whose fair skin and golden hair were faithful to historical description rather than Spanish stereotypes. Annette Crosbie won a BAFTA award for her performance, and deservedly. In her Katherine, we saw a consistent personality develop over time, from a bubbly but regal young woman to a steely monarch who, unlike more clichéd, contemporary portraits, never descends into long-suffering pathos.

Crosbie was helped by the fact that her character appeared in only one episode, written by just one screenwriter, Rosemary Sisson, who had a clear and steady vision of her heroine. Anne’s role, in contrast, was spread out over two episodes that were written by two authors with very different views of her. She appears at the end of Sisson’s episode as a coldhearted, gossipy, and cackling harbinger of what is to come for Katherine. Then in Nick McCarty’s episode, devoted almost entirely (except for a brief montage of happier days) to Anne’s fall, she suddenly becomes dignified, principled, and much more sympathetic. Between the harpy of the “Katherine” episode and the stoical queen of the “Anne” episode, there is a vacuum, which viewers filled as they pleased. But although the role was not coherent, and some said she was too old (perhaps true for the first episode but not for the second), Dorothy Tutin brought a solidity to her Anne that those who followed her lacked. All of them emphasized cunning and sexual flirtatiousness—traits that, while they may have been true to aspects of Anne’s personality, made her seem too much of a lightweight to fuel the six-year obsession of the king, especially when played by such young actresses. Tutin projected more; she understood that it was not just Katherine who had dignity.

I saw the BBC series when it first aired on television, and I found it anything but stuffy. For viewers of that era,
Masterpiece Theatre
and its ilk, while usually dealing with “classics” heavily encrusted with “Britishness” (Alistair Cooke introduced each show sitting in an imaginary English country house), were our first experience of what has become
the
most popular form of American television addiction: the prime-time miniseries. It didn’t feel “classic-y,” it felt intimate and involving. Until then, only comedy, action, and variety shows had given us ongoing interaction with familiar actors and characters; drama (with the exception of the daytime soaps) began and ended in the space of an hour. Now I became frantic if I had to miss one of the twenty-six episodes of
The Forsyte Saga
(this was pre-TiVo and DVR, even pre-VCR for ordinary people), was riveted by
I, Claudius
and
Elizabeth R,
remained devoted to Sunday night PBS through
Brideshead Revisited
and even some series that have disappeared from collective memory almost entirely:
Danger UXB
followed the lives and loves of the young men who detonated unexploded bombs in the streets of London during World War II. Arguably, these shows were the forerunners and inspiration for American prime-time series such as
Roots, Lonesome Dove,
and
The Winds of War.
Ultimately, with
Dallas
and
Dynasty,
the nighttime series fare became far schlockier. In the early seventies, our tastes were not classier; they were just less jaded, less numbed. We didn’t need sex and scheming to become engaged; a good story that lasted for a while was juicy enough.

By the time Robert Greenblatt, the award-winning producer of HBO’s
Six Feet Under,
then president of Showtime and known as “the man who out-HBO’d HBO”
³
with such innovative series as
Dexter, The L Word,
and
Weeds,
got the idea to do a series on the Tudors, those once-delicious PBS shows had come to seem (as various writers and actors associated with
The Tudors
put it) “old-fashioned,” “wooden,” “stiff,” “starchy,” “rigid,” and—as Greenblatt described it—“safe in a, you know, ‘BBC’ way.”
⁴
(Jonathan Rhys Meyers, more crudely, referred to previous approaches as “period puke.”
⁵
) Greenblatt’s goal for the series he had in mind was to “breathe new life” into the Henry VIII story by offering a “younger and sexier version,” with plenty of beheadings and “more sensual reality.”
⁶
Greenblatt had a certain amount of experience with “young and sexy” when he was executive vice president of prime-time programming for the Fox Broadcasting Company, where he had helped to develop such hits as the original
Beverly Hills, 90210;
Melrose Place;
The X-Files;
Party of Five;
Ally McBeal;
and
King of the Hill
(as well as the pilots for
The Sopranos
and
Dawson’s Creek
).

Michael Hirst, who studied English literature at Oxford and wrote the screenplay for
Elizabeth
(and later, the sequel), was commissioned to do the pilot and was expressly asked to do it by Reveille Productions founder Ben Silverman as a “kind of American soap opera” about politics, power, and sexuality, like
The West Wing
and
The Sopranos.
“I hadn’t worked in TV before,” Hirst told me in a 2011 phone interview. “And although I had seen
The Sopranos,
I didn’t really know what he was talking about. Was he asking me to dumb down the story?”
⁷
This was not what Hirst was interested in doing. In fact, one of his pet passions, in imagining a series on the Tudors, was to open up a fresh understanding of the Reformation, so often simply glorified as leading to the “golden age” of Elizabeth and Shakespeare. But in Hirst’s view, it left deep “psychic wounds” in England. He was skeptical about the possibilities of doing this without becoming “didactic,” but after reviewing episodes of
The West Wing,
which he hadn’t seen before, Hirst became convinced that it was possible to “be entertaining and commercial but about serious things. You could develop ideas, and I could actually talk about important things like the Reformation, but without lecturing.”
⁸
So he decided to “have a go” and wound up in love with the project.

Among the ideas Hirst was most interested in developing was a revision of the “cartoon vision of Henry VIII as this fat, bearded monster. People seem not to understand that historical figures, behind the iconography, were human beings. That’s the way I approached Elizabeth
,
and I did it with Henry.”
⁹
At the center of this revision was the actor chosen to play the most post-Holbein, post-Laughton—and, one might say, postmodern—Henry yet. He was not just young, but
very
young, brown-haired, as physically taut as a J.Crew model, and pulsing with dangerous sensuality. The actor chosen was Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the pillow-lipped Irish actor who had won a Golden Globe for his performance in the CBS miniseries
Elvis
. Hirst felt that Rhys Meyers would actually bring the Tudor king more in line with historical reality. “Jonny, by instinct, has many of the same qualities as Henry,” he said in an early interview. “He has a short attention span. He never thinks there’s anything he can’t do.”
¹⁰
Brian Kirk, one of the show’s directors, pointed out that Jonny’s knowledge of the Hollywood star system would give him a “parallel experience to draw on” as the “rock star” of the court.
¹¹
Meyers, who admits to having done very little research for the role, continues the comparison: “Henry’s court at that time was the fastest court in the world. If you weren’t in Henry’s court, you were nobody . . . It was the Mecca of entertainment.”
¹²
Um, historians of Francis’s court might have something to say about that.

On the darker end of the comparisons, Rhys Meyers has also been reported to be a heavy partier and womanizer, with poor impulse control. “Jonny has always been on the brink of going really off the rails,” says a friend, after Rhys Meyers became aggressive with the airport staffer who woke him up after he fell asleep, drunk, on the floor of the airport.
¹³
“He is a clever boy and likes to play mind games,” says another.
¹⁴
Henry’s behavior—whether aggressive or sexual—was, of course, usually well contained by his sense of the necessary kingly image, but he was prone to sudden outbursts of rage, particularly in later life, and his “mind games” were well-known.

The younger Henry was also known for his athleticism and was often described as extremely handsome. Of course, there was a certain amount of required flattery going on in these descriptions. But the fact that Henry was over six feet tall, well-built (in his youth), and vividly complected in an era in which life was “nasty, brutish, and short” counted for a lot. Compact, wiry Jonathan Rhys Meyers, seen in terms of Tudor standards, was a very odd choice; a taller, more robust Henry—think, for example, of a slimmed-down Russell Crowe—would have preserved some aesthetic continuity with the real Henry. Joan Bergin, in her costuming, tried to do just this by creatively combining authentic Tudor styling with fashion from other eras—Degas paintings, Balenciaga couture—in order to achieve a “more modern sensibility.” She called this process “deconstructed Tudor.”
¹⁵
But Jonathan Rhys Meyers wasn’t even a “deconstructed” Henry; he was a radically resculpted one.

Meyers, apparently, called quite a few of the shots here. He refused, for example, to gain weight—or to wear prosthetics—as the series went on. Both Hirst and Meyers have tried to justify this. Hirst has given a few different explanations. In a 2008 interview, he said that he didn’t want people to say, “Oh, look. That is Henry VIII. We wanted to get closer to the spirit of the thing, to a kind of reality. And the reality was that Henry was young, virile, very charismatic, very dangerous.”
¹⁶
In his 2011 interview with me, he began by saying that a “big body suit” would have looked ridiculous on Rhys Meyers’s “small head,” and he “never wanted to go down the line of a slightly comical Henry.”
¹⁷
Eventually, however, Hirst admitted to me that “we simply couldn’t have gotten Jonny to do it. He would not have been able to tolerate looking grotesque.”
¹⁸
Rhys Meyers has tried to justify his refusal in commercial terms. “Listen,” he told the
Sunday Times
when the show aired in the U.S. in 2007, “you’re trying to sell a historical period drama to a country like America—you do not want a big, fat, 250-pound, red-haired guy with a beard. It doesn’t let people embrace the fantastic monarch he was, because they’re not attracted to the package. Heroes do not look like Henry VIII. That is just the world we live in.”
¹⁹
Of course—setting aside the insult to redheads and Americans—Henry didn’t become fat overnight, and by the time that he did, he was hardly a “hero.” In another interview, Rhys Meyers admits that “I just didn’t want to be Fat Henry.”
²⁰
That seems to have been the bottom line.

Natalie Dormer, the twenty-six-year-old actress who was chosen to play the role of Anne Boleyn, approached her assignment very differently. A longtime British history buff who had, in fact, hoped to study history at Cambridge (she misunderstood a question on her A-level exams and failed to get the necessary grade for acceptance), Natalie has strong opinions about the real Anne, and when she got the role, she was excited over the prospect of embodying her as accurately as possible. “I didn’t want to play her as this femme fatale—she was a genuine evangelical with a real religious belief in the Reformation.”
²¹
Dormer also came to the role well aware of the stereotypes and gender biases that had dogged Anne, both in her lifetime and in later representations.