Meet TV’s (very unlikely) new King Arthur
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“Luckily, I had a very strong pad on my back.” Iain De Caestecker, the latest in a very long line of actors to play Arthur Pendragon, simultaneously laughs and winces as he recalls filming the opening scenes of The Winter King. ITVX’s 10-part drama begins with Arthur’s father, King Uther – played with his customary intensity by Eddie Marsan – raining blows down on his despised bastard son. “Eddie’s a lovely, jolly, sweet man, but he was really hammering down on me. He gets in character, that guy.”
It’s a violent opener to the series but it’s a tea party compared with the blood-spattered scenes to come as the splintered mini-kingdoms of 5th-century Britain vie gorily for supremacy. It’s up to De Caestecker’s Arthur, the once and future king, to take charge of his father’s kingdom on the South Wales coast and quell the chaos.
De Caestecker, 35, is best known for playing the hot-nerd weapons engineer Dr Leopold Fitz in seven seasons (2013-20) of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the US. There is an ingenuous, innocent quality to his acting which explains why, in his mid-20s, he was hand-picked by Ryan Gosling to play a troubled teenager in his debut film as director, Lost River. All in all: unlikely casting for a warlord.
His Arthur is not an earthy warrior like Clive Owen’s (in the 2004 film King Arthur), a natural aristocrat like Nigel Terry’s (Excalibur) or a hot-headed pretty-boy like Bradley James’s (in the TV show Merlin). He’s compassionate but practical, a cunning strategist in a world in which leaders usually smash and stab their way out of their problems, but ruthless when necessary.
De Caestecker did not feel the need to study his many predecessors in the role. “That’s because I felt that this version was so different from anything I’d seen before: it’s heavily focused on the more human side of the character and his relation to the real-world politics of the time. Also the scripts were rich enough for me not to feel the need to – and the source material, the books, which I loved.”
He is referring to The Warlord Chronicles, a trilogy of novels written in the 1990s by Bernard Cornwell; the hope is that The Winter King will command the enduring popularity of two other historical dramas adapted from Cornwell’s works, Sharpe and The Last Kingdom. Cornwell wrote the books after immersing himself in Old Welsh sources, which give a grittier and less fanciful view of the period than the later medieval Arthurian romances by Chrétien de Troyes and Sir Thomas Malory.
“It was a really barbaric time, and we show that,” says De Caestecker. “It’s not done for the sake of being provocative, but it’s dramatic because when Arthur is making decisions, the stakes are so high – everything is life and death. You don’t get a slap on the wrist in the Dark Ages.”
Despite the bloody realism, the series boasts a touch of magic in the form of Merlin – played here by 40-year-old Nathaniel Martello-White as a smouldering shaman rather than the usual testy greybeard. “It’s a remarkable performance. I think Arthur gets a lot of his good nature and humility from his time spent in Avalon [imagined here as a kind of hippy commune] when he was growing up, with Merlin giving him the guidance and love he never got from Uther.”
De Caestecker admits that “portraying the hard, confident, courageous side [of Arthur] is something that took a lot more work for me than the kind, empathetic side. I don’t have cheese-grater abs, I’m never going to be Sylvester Stallone. But the costumes help, and it helps to give you a certain swagger just to feel the weight of a sword in your hand.
“And riding the horses: I found you have no choice but to be stoic when you’re on the back of one, they sort of imbue some of their stoicism into you.” He laughs as he recalls the Monty Python-esque rehearsals when the horses were resting and the actors had to pretend to move as if on horseback: he ought to be a shoo-in for the lead in a revival of Spamalot.
De Caestecker was born and brought up in Glasgow, and was proud of being able to retain his Scottish accent in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. By rights, his Arthur ought to sound Welsh, but he can’t do the accent – “it will go into Birmingham and then South African…” – and has opted for standard English RP. “My dad’s English, and you know what it’s like growing up, you imitate your parents to make fun of them, so that accent’s never been a problem for me.”
He relished his time filming among the bleak beauty of the Welsh landscape, thrillingly captured in the series. “We filmed in winter: the breath coming out of our mouths definitely hasn’t been CGI’d. It was arduous at times being covered in blood and gunk and muck all day, but one thing I’ll say is there was never a day when you came in and everyone didn’t have a smile on their face.”
Not all of his acting experiences have been so happy, however. “I’ve often played characters who are quite anxious and – I didn’t have this problem when I was younger – it affects me.” Last year he played an emergency services call handler whose life spirals out of control in the BBC thriller The Control Room. “It was a really fast-paced nailbiter, a fantastic script, but I spent weeks filming this thing as a character in a constant state of fight-or-flight mode, and I found it really made its way into my body and afterwards I didn’t know how to get rid of it. It really knocked me for six.
“I’d never done this before, but I had to go and talk to someone professional about it. Arthur has lots of pressures and weights on his shoulders too, but because he’s so stoical, it’s easier to process.”
De Caestecker is genial and forthcoming but clearly at heart a private man, whose discomfort with fame has caused him to consider giving up acting at times. It stems from his early teens when he played Adam Barlow, grandson of Ken, in Coronation Street.
“I loved doing it because I got to stay off school and stay in hotels. But nobody really prepared me: millions of people watch it and the day after your first episode goes out, you have people all over you as soon as you step out the front door. Then your friends take the p--s because of that, and suddenly you feel like you’re a bit different, I guess. But I do appreciate people coming up to say something nice.”
De Caestecker – “it’s a Flemish Belgian name and it means ‘cheese tester’; even I forget how to spell it sometimes” – is the son of two doctors. His mother, Linda, recently retired as one of Scotland’s most senior health officials: “She’s on TV more than I am in Scotland.”
He has been based in London for many years – he now lives with his girlfriend, the actress Ann Skelly – but spent the bulk of the 2010s in Los Angeles while making 126 episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. He enjoyed LA, although it was a bit prim for somebody used to the pubs of Glasgow. “I remember my first party there – me and my mate were so excited because there was a free bar. But nobody else was drinking. And we got really drunk and made idiots of ourselves a bit – we got some strange looks across the swimming pool. I thought the point of a party was to have fun.”
He’s hoping to get back to Wales if The Winter King is recommissioned, and in the meantime is trying to count his blessings. “If I could tell my nine-year-old self what I’m doing now for a living, he’d be bouncing off the walls and screaming for joy. I think of that whenever I’m feeling jaded.”
The Winter King begins on ITVX on December 21
