Becoming Elizabeth wants to show you a new side of Elizabeth I — as a naive, thirsty teenager
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Even if you only have a cursory knowledge of European history, you probably feel like you know Queen Elizabeth I fairly well — that enormous ruff, the white face make-up, defeating the Spanish Armada, and her reputation as the Virgin Queen.
But with Becoming Elizabeth, which premieres June 12, Starz is setting out to give audiences an entirely new side of the Tudor monarch. Created by George Ormond and Anya Reiss, the series delves into Elizabeth's teenage years as she finds herself mired in political intrigue above her head in the wake of her father King Henry VIII's death.
"It's a massively untold bit of history," Reiss tells EW. "I thought I didn't want to do anything about Elizabeth because the story was done, and then, George started telling me the story and it was like sitting listening through the soapiest of soaps. It felt like massively rich territory, and that's just in terms of the history. Elizabeth's personal story that goes through it is extraordinary also. I was amazed by how much it feels like it informs who she was later down the line. I just kept going, 'Oh, is that why she didn't get married? Or is that why she made those decisions over war?' And everything was falling into place like a jigsaw of my understanding of who she was later down the line. But it also reshaped who I thought she was."
Nick Briggs/Starz
Alicia von Rittberg, who portrays Elizabeth on the series, echoes the desire to find connections between this younger version of Elizabeth and the queen she would become. "The way she observed and learned and then found her way. She's the most intelligent woman," she says. "She found her own voice and how there is such a beautiful way to lead in a female way in an emotional and vulnerable way and gain respect with softness. That's what I tried to get out [of her] when she's younger. The way that she was later on is definitely a choice that she made because she experienced such pain and such difficult relationships during her early years. It makes so much sense that she didn't get married, and she did it all on her own. And she wanted to be seen as the Virgin Queen."
One major aspect of this re-framing was reminding audiences how young Elizabeth was when she was thrust into these political schemes of the Tudor court. On the series, she is only 14 (played by a 28-year-old Von Rittberg) when we meet her — and both Reiss and Ormond wanted viewers to understand the reality of that. Particularly, as Elizabeth finds herself embroiled in crushes and questionable romantic liasions.
"This is a story about a teenager who feels she's an adult," says Ormond. "She's trying, as lots of teenagers do — they feel they're in control in a way when they look back on that time as an adult, they might think, actually, I wasn't completely in control, and that Iis a really interesting thing to explore."
"I was struck by how they did know she was a child," adds Reiss. "My impression was, 'Everyone got married at like 10 though, didn't they?' And that's really not true. We often get away with acting like [in] the past there was a different set of standards, but it wasn't actually that different a code of morality. We get away with a lot now by going, 'Oh, they were they were different creatures then, everything was different. And now there are these new rules and how are we meant to kind of abide by them?' And actually, some things have always been true and some things have always been unacceptable. There is a thread of what is true for humanity — and what people feel is right."
That also meant humanizing all of the characters we meet, including Mary Tudor (Romola Garai) and her Catholic fanaticism, the scheming Duke of Somerset (John Heffernan), Henry VIII's widow Catherine Parr (Jessica Raine), and Thomas Seymour (Tom Cullen).
For Reiss, the key lay in historical anecdotes and accounts that allowed her to pinpoint recognizable behaviors, such as a time that Somerset made one of his privy councillors cry in a meeting.
The cast also sought to infuse their work with that ethos, particularly for more villainized figures like Mary Tudor. "It is really important to remember that the level of devotion to her faith would have been no different to anyone else at that period of time," says Garai. "Edward was equally devoted to Protestantism. Catherine Parr was profoundly Protestant. But Mary was in a position to actually do something about it. The religious persecution of her father's reign was definitely comparable to the religious persecution of her reign. But nobody called him 'Bloody Henry.' It's important to remember that history was written by Protestants in Britain. So, her legacy was very much a result of part of the Protestant Reformation Project, and that she had to be vilified and demonized in order to keep the country Protestant. All of that being said, it's hard when you think about somebody taking decisions to the [point of the] state murdering people. But she believed that people that were trying to make the country Protestant were literally working on behalf of the devil. You have to connect with those ideas in a much more literal way."
Starz has a long history of lush, historical drama with series like Outlander and The Spanish Princess, but here, Reiss and Ormond are presenting viewers with familiar historical figures and shedding light on the pieces that often elude the complexities of historical truth.
Becoming Elizabeth premieres June 12 at 9 p.m. ET on Starz.
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