When filming an orgy scene at a historic home, one has to have in mind the conservation necessities. “A type of stately properties we labored in was a 14th-century constructing,” says Tony Curran, who performs the Seventeenth-century King James within the racy new seven-part drama Mary & George. “And we couldn’t use any moisture in there. I don’t know the way lengthy orgies final – I can’t say I’ve ever been in a single – however certainly there could be a little bit of perspiration considerably?” However no spray-on sweat was allowed, no fluids in any respect. A really dry orgy, I recommend. “A really dry orgy!” says Curran with amusing. “Perhaps like sure royals, we don’t sweat.”
Curran has labored steadily and efficiently for many years, from difficult movies (Andrea Arnold’s debut Pink Highway) to Marvel universe exhibits (he was in final yr’s Disney+ collection Secret Invasion with Olivia Colman). Nevertheless it’s solely comparatively lately, in his 50s, that Curran has been given the bigger roles he deserves – he was wonderful taking part in a terminally sick man within the 2022 BBC drama Mayflies. “Mary & George has been an actual pleasure to be part of, an actual problem and hopefully folks will see it.” He smiles. “And can supply me extra work.”
The Mary of the title is Mary Villiers (a sometimes good Julianne Moore) who, in her lovely second son George (Nicholas Galitzine), sees every little thing she must advance in life. “If I had been a person and I appeared such as you, I’d rule the fucking planet,” says Mary, earlier than transport George off to France to be taught refinement and set his sights a bit greater than the servant woman he claims to be in love with. Off he goes, a bit pathetic, and comes again (because of these orgies, maybe) assured and nearly as worldly as his mom. She now trains him on King James (VI of Scotland, I of England), set on getting him into the monarch’s bedchamber. James is, she says, “so cockstruck, it’s like a curse”.
The intercourse, of which there’s an abundance, together with lots of queer Jacobean intercourse, will seize consideration. “Whether or not or not it was as overt in public as possibly at instances we painting it within the present – it’s as much as the viewers to resolve whether or not they get taken into that world.” And whereas there may be, says Curran, “a sexual rawness to James and George, I don’t suppose that’s what the present is about”. For George, it’s intercourse as forex. For James, it’s one thing else.
“When you may’t discover which means in life, you discover distraction – lascivious nature, hedonism, consuming – however I feel James needed to seek out which means and distraction. He needed to get away from courtroom, from the pressures of management, of political life.” He remembers on the brink of re-record some dialogue and rewatching a scene by which James and George kiss, and seeing the tenderness. Sexual attract, he says, notably for George and Mary, is about energy, “however then there’s a friendship and in the end a love, and vulnerability. There are letters from King James to George, and he would [write] ‘my candy little one and spouse’.”
The actual Mary and George are buried, as is James, at Westminster Abbey – barely 10 minutes’ stroll from the place Curran and I are speaking in a London resort room – a rare resting place for 2 folks, commoners primarily, who scaled the heights of energy. “Mary Villiers has an unimaginable story – a girl throughout a time when she had no company, her husband died and he or she was left with money owed and 4 youngsters. Her single-mindedness and uncompromising imaginative and prescient was fairly unimaginable.”
Working with Moore, he says, was “inspiring. She was a delight, lots of enjoyable, very centered.” There have been, he factors out with a smile, lots of redheads on set. “The extra the merrier.” I ask him how a lot anti-ginger prejudice he’d skilled in his life. There was bullying at college, he says. Later, when Curran performed well-known redhead Vincent van Gogh in two 2010 episodes of Physician Who, somebody requested him what, if he might get right into a Tardis, would he change about his previous. “I mentioned one thing like, I’d return to once I was an adolescent and say, ‘Don’t give your self a lot of a tough time.’ However as you become old, it rubs off you.”
Curran grew up in Glasgow, the place his mom labored for British Telecom and his father was a taxi driver. Theirs wasn’t a household with a historical past within the performing arts. “My uncle was a redcoat at Butlin’s. I feel that’s about so far as it goes,” he says. Curran acquired concerned with youth theatre and had his first function on Scottish TV in a youngsters’s drama, Stookie. He left faculty at “15 or 16, I wasn’t educational frankly”. Later, he attended the then Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.
In London, the place he moved when he was 24, one in every of Curran’s first mainstream TV roles was because the plumber Lenny within the influential drama This Life. “I keep in mind considering this was fairly cool.” Within the 90s, when Curran performed Lenny, who’s homosexual, there wasn’t the identical dialog about whether or not straight actors ought to play queer roles, however now folks will query whether or not Curran – who’s straight – ought to have been forged as King James. He acknowledges the argument, however believes that for actors to solely play what they’re, “I really feel dilutes what we do as efficiency artists, as a result of the place is the appearing? The place are the basics of exploring one other human psyche? For me a very powerful factor is to seek out out who that particular person is and attempt to signify them as in truth as I presumably can. In that sense, as actors we’re extra like chameleons, we’re making an attempt to turn into something we are able to and I feel that’s factor.”
He was intrigued by James I, as a result of we haven’t, he factors out, seen a lot of him on display screen. “He was some of the compelling characters I’ve ever performed,” says Curran. James succeeded Elizabeth I, and an enormous quantity of historical past swirls round him – the gunpowder plot, Shakespeare, the witch trials, his translation of the bible, the beginnings of the UK, and the push into imperialism. When James was a child, his father, Lord Darnley, was assassinated, and his mom, Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned, by no means to see her son once more (she was later executed).
“He used to put on padding in his doublet in case he acquired stabbed,” says Curran, who spent lots of time speaking to Benjamin Woolley, creator of the novel The King’s Murderer on which Mary & George relies. “The time period that he got here up with was, King James ‘was nourished in concern’. That was one thing that was useful to me – his paranoia, and curiosity in demonology and witchcraft. He’s a compelling determine, after which on high of that was his sexuality.” Why don’t we hear a lot about him, wonders Curran. “Was it as a result of he was perceived as a weak king?” He didn’t need to wage struggle on France and Spain. “Was he perceived as a queer king, [so] ‘let’s sweep that apart, we are able to’t have that’?”
A contemporary tackle the period appeared overdue, and Mary & George feels well timed in some ways. Who can hear Mary’s warning concerning the plight of second sons – “elevate your self, or you may be nothing” – with out considering of a sure red-headed royal? And far will be reassessed by a contemporary lens: from the place of monarchy in our society – when Elizabeth II took the throne in 1953, a majority of the inhabitants believed she had divine proper, which might be unthinkable now with Charles’s accession – to the inspiration and way forward for the union.
“When the Acts of Union occurred in 1707, that was James’s dream,” says Curran. “He needed to carry the kingdoms collectively, to have peace. So it was his fault principally.” Curran, who has lived in LA for the final 20 years, helps Scottish independence. For him, it’s not concerning the “outdated enemy” of England, he says. “Since you’re professional this, it doesn’t imply you’re anti that, however I can’t deny that being introduced up with the years of Thatcher, in Scotland, was sort of powerful. Is it a romantic notion? Or might it work? Does Scotland have the financial energy to face alone? I don’t see why they’ll’t.” Although James, he provides, most likely wouldn’t be completely satisfied.
