How Becoming Elizabeth Star Alicia von Ritter Learned to Play Royal
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“If the acting doesn’t go well,” says Alicia von Rittberg, “calligraphy could be my next career.” The star of the new series Becoming Elizabeth is in New York City just ahead of the show’s premiere—the first of eight episodes airs Sunday, June 12 on Starz—and she’s listing the skills she mastered playing Elizabeth I in the period drama.
“I learned skills like horseback riding and dancing,” the 28-year-old, German-born actress says. “I had movement coaching and they tell you how to move with a certain posture, especially when the costumes slow everything down. All of these things were so interesting to learn, and for half a year I felt like I was living the actual life of Elizabeth.”
Among all of the Tudor-era skills that von Rittberg had to master, however, calligraphy—which she’s still in the habit of practicing—might have been the most vexing. Quills need to be broken in, feathers fracture, and that’s before any real handwriting is mastered. “Elizabeth was meant to have the most beautiful handwriting you can imagine,” says von Rittberg, a countess herself by birth. “So, I was sitting there for months trying to get it right, but it felt impossible.”
If the calligraphy was challenging, however, portraying Elizabeth I—the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, who took the throne at just 25 years old—seems to come to von Ritter naturally. “There’s something quite enigmatic about the way Alicia plays Elizabeth,” says Becoming Elizabeth writer and executive producer Anya Reiss, “and there’s something quite enigmatic about Alicia as well. Putting Elizabeth on screen can make her lose a lot of her mystery, but Alicia manages quite well to convey a lot without giving away what she’s thinking. That’s a quality she brings to the role, which is so unusual. You aren’t shut out of her thought process, but it’s not all always available to you.”
Von Ritter says that could be due to the fact that, in this series, the future monarch is introduced to viewers when she’s still quite young. She isn’t yet the person she’ll become, and so there’s room for vulnerability that other portrayals might not have allowed.
“I tried to develop some blind spots around what’s known about Queen Elizabeth,” says von Ritter, whose big break came opposite Brad Pitt in the 2014 movie Fury. “I didn’t want anything from later in her life to inform the young girl I was playing. I tried to ignore all of that and to approach it from a more emotional, human point of view.”
Which isn’t to say the story is a classic coming of age. Instead, Becoming Elizabeth—which one recent review called “Succession for Royals”—follows its title character as she grows up, but doesn’t flinch from the strange circumstances that surround her. There are feuding, scheming siblings; there are candle-lit encounters with Thomas Seymour (Tom Cullen), the now-husband of Elizabeth’s father’s final wife; there are the brutal expectations heaped upon young women that can make any choice seem like the wrong one. It’s not quite The Princess Diaries.
“If people look at Elizabeth I the queen, they think she was this strong, opinionated fighter,” von Ritter notes. “I love the fact that I was allowed to go with a more vulnerable, softer version of that. What made her brilliant and such an impeccable leader was that she had ability to sit back, observe, and learn. To allow her to be softer than you’d think she would be—and also completely lonely and scared as an orphan in a dangerous world—when later on she’s so strong is something I really wanted.”
Indeed, even among the most difficult relationships the series portrays, there’s a sense that it’s attempting to show an audience real people, not just caricatures in crowns. It gives Becoming Elizabeth an intelligence that other period dramas lack, and also served to remind von Ritter—a fan of The Crown and other royal-adjacent entertainment—that behind all characters are actual human beings. “I always try to look at these characters as people instead of public figures,” she says. “It’s always worth understanding where they’re coming from.”
As for taking up calligraphy as a full-time pursuit, well, it doesn’t seem likely. Next, von Ritter will star in the horror movie Leave, and she’s open to revisiting a royal role if the moment feels right. “The more you can mix it up, the more exciting it gets,” she says of acting. “On one hand, I’d absolutely love to do something crazy and totally opposite from Elizabeth, but on the other I’d also love to see Elizabeth become even more bad-ass. I could easily continue doing that for a bit. That would be the dream.”
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