“There’s Still Not Enough”: The Serpent Queen Star Samantha Morton on Powerful Roles for Women
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The post “There’s Still Not Enough”: The Serpent Queen Star Samantha Morton on Powerful Roles for Women appeared first on Consequence.
The new Starz series The Serpent Queen brings modern flair and an extremely unreliable narrator to the well-worn genre of period dramas, as an older Catherine de’ Medici (Samantha Morton) tells a servant girl (Sennia Nanua) about how her younger self (Liv Hill) came to control France for decades.
In Morton’s hands, Catherine is a fascinating and complex character, and when speaking with the Oscar-nominated actress via Zoom, I really wanted to ask her about playing powerful women, a recent theme in her work. But I also admitted to her that I felt a little silly about it, as film and television currently feature a ton of examples of powerful, strong, and nuanced female characters.
Morton, it turns out, agrees with that, but also says “there’s still not enough. I think in television, they’re really embracing that, but in Hollywood, they haven’t embraced it yet in the way they should. We need more female writers and we need more female stories. People need to know that women will go and watch this, because you have fifty-fifty [percent men and women] on the planet, you know, not everybody wants to watch the male view.”
As Morton continues, “We just need a bit more equality. In British cinema as well — they’re petrified of our stories. They allow us maybe one or two, every once in a while. Because then we need guy stories, guys winning wars, guys fixing the problem, guys making people laugh. It shouldn’t be a feminist issue. It should just be equality. It’s, you know, half and half. It’s a no-brainer.”
Morton’s position on this is striking, especially after hearing her break down how so many of her roles have featured powerful women whose misdeeds come from relatable places, including child-killer Myra Hindley in the dark HBO biopic Longford or, more recently, the ruthless Alpha on The Walking Dead. Below, transcribed and edited for clarity, she explains to Consequence what made Catherine de’ Medici specifically so intriguing for her, and why she has no interest in playing superheroes. (Her answer has a lot to do with who she thinks the real heroes are in this world.)
To start off, what was the first thing about taking on this project that got you excited about it?
I think the first thing that got me excited was that I didn’t really know anything about her when this project came my way. I’d heard of the Medici name. That’s quite a famous name, certainly in arts and culture and banking and all the rest of it. But I just didn’t know about Catherine. So having been intrigued by the idea of the story, then reading the scripts, then listening to the audio book, I’ve just thought, what an incredible role to play
What was the quality that most stuck out to you about her?
Survival. I think the perseverance and the ability to survive different environments with different people without the level of narcissism… Sometimes, you know, we look at people like Napoleon or Churchill and a lot of these famous people in history have these very complex needy personalities. Whereas she seemed very quiet, almost like the person that you don’t notice in the room — but they’re often the ones that you need to notice the most, because maybe they’re taking it all in. I found her fascinating.
Talking about Catherine and how she was overlooked — what do you feel like is the key to finding her power in that situation?
I think as an actor, it’s the truth, and not being afraid of the truth, but I think then it’s down to the filmmakers — the director, the writer, the composer, the editor — to make sure that when they’re putting the footage together and they’re presenting the show to you, the audience, that they understand that character as well, and that they can share that. Because sometimes they might have the right idea and then it’s kind of lost in the mix. So it’s a hard one to get right, because I’m only one little element in lots and lots of elements, in order to tell the story.
It feels like an understatement to say that recently, you’ve gotten to play some really powerful women. What have you learned about playing powerful women? Is there something that’s come out of that experience?
I think some of the powerful women I’ve played have been powerful for kind of all different, strange reasons. Some have been powerful in the fact that they’ve done evil acts that, you know, in history they’ll be vilified for — they’ll be remembered for doing horrific things. And then some of the people I’ve played are based on real people that are very vulnerable, but powerful in the choices they make and the reasons they make them.
In a TV film I made a couple of years ago, I Am Kirsty, Kirsty was a young mother who was forced into sex work based on the fact that she was trying to protect her children and needed to feed her children. So that was about austerity and the British government and how they’re treating people in Britain today and the cost of living crisis.
And then Myra Hindley is obviously someone that was horrific in history, but ultimately in order to understand people, sometimes we have to look at them and try and break them apart to prevent this from ever happening again. With Alpha in The Walking Dead, another very strong formidable character, again, it’s about survival and protecting her child.
The Walking Dead (AMC)
So we have all these different versions of why women are protectors and why they have to find strength in their boots, if you like in their bones, in their blood, in their breath, in order to get through and to protect those they love. But I think historically women do that every day. There are women every day that get up in the morning, bone tired, go and clean someone else’s house for not very much money, go home, then cook a meal for eight people live in very cramped situations.
And to me, they’re heroes too, they’re surviving and they’re looking after their families. There are women who get absolutely zero appreciation from other people that just grind every day. Get on that bus, go to that job, look at, you know, a carer for somebody get paid very little, come home without anybody saying, “Hey, do you want me to make your a cup of tea? Or should I do your laundry?” Or love them?
These are the individuals that hold society together, you know, they’re probably people that people might not look at twice on the bus or the subway, but to me, they’re the heroes in life. And so I think that what I’m trying to do is play the person that gets overlooked, the person that isn’t cared about. I find those stories very fascinating.
And so a few of the characters I’ve played are considered ordinary. In Catherine’s world, she wasn’t beautiful and was always put down because she wasn’t beautiful or she didn’t have the right blood: “She’s not royal, she’s common, she’s not worth anything.”
You know, I find telling those stories to be the right thing to do. It means that when I talk to you, I’m proud of them. You know, I’m not interested in playing superheroes or models that look a certain way — I can’t, because my brain can’t compute to that, and I think you are most powerful, when you perform, when you have empathy for the person that you are playing.
The season premiere of The Serpent Queen is available now via the Starz app and all Starz streaming and on-demand platforms. It will debut on Starz at 8:00 ET P.M. Sunday, September 11th.
“There’s Still Not Enough”: The Serpent Queen Star Samantha Morton on Powerful Roles for Women
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