The Royal Pains of The Serpent Queen's Samantha Morton
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Samantha Morton wasn’t looking for a job. The actress was already working on a film, making conversation with her makeup designer, Jacquetta Levon, when the prospect of Catherine de Medici first came up.
“In the morning, she’d be doing my makeup, and I’d ask, ‘How are you, Jacquetta?’ and she would tell me about The Serpent Queen,” the two-time Oscar nominee recalls. “I’d ask her who they had to play Catherine, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ At that point I was this outside observer, but I was really interested, so I was suggesting all of these actresses I thought would be brilliant.”
After wrapping the film, Morton went home to Sussex, where she fielded an email from her manager asking if she had time to read scripts over the coming weekend. “I was like, ‘well, it depends, what is it?’” she says. “Then I saw that it was The Serpent Queen, and I was like, ‘Oh, I know about that! How fascinating that it’s come my way.’”
She had good reason to be excited. The Serpent Queen, based on the book Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France by Leonie Frieda is a sharp, funny period piece (premiering September 11 on Starz) that tells the story of Medici, the infamous Italian aristocrat who became the Queen of France and whose family name is still today among the weightiest in the world. Creator Justin Haythe’s version of history—which also stars Charles Dance, Liv Hill, and Ludivine Sagnier, among others—isn’t just another costume drama, instead it tells the story of a young girl who was raised in an orphanage and became one of history’s most powerful women. It also features modern language (plenty of it delightfully filthy), a regularly broken fourth wall, and a deep reverence for its namesake if not much else.
“I feel so kind of in awe of Catherine, and so honored to play her,” Morton tells T&C. “As well as a huge responsibility to give her authenticity the best I could. When you contemporize the drama, that's when you’re allowing these characters to tell their stories. If you’re going to break the fourth wall, you have to make sure you’re not doing it just for effect. Catherine really is seeing the audience as a confidant, she’s saying, ‘this is real, can you believe it?’ There are certain certain streaming channels that do make chocolate-box costume dramas, but you never feel that you are in it because it feels so fake. Everything might look great, but you don't feel anything. That's the trick: the truth of the story has to come first.”
When she started on the project, Morton thought she didn’t know much about the truth behind Medici—a scion of a Florentine banking dynasty that would produce politicians, kings, and popes, and made invaluable contributions to the arts—but that illusion didn’t last long.
“I realized I knew more about her than I thought because of how the events that unfolded in her life have permeated society and are still here today,” she says. “Look at Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and the poison apple, the evil queen, and looking in the mirror to see the future—Catherine did that first.”
Morton also did her homework, reading about Medici and studying her life, and became convinced that hers was a story that required closer examination. “Stories that inspire us need to be told,” she says. “We hear a lot about Napoleon or Henry VIII, we hear about incredible world leaders, but it’s normally men who are ruling society.” Morton isn’t entirely sold on period pieces that focus on living characters—"I have an issue with The Crown, personally,” she says. “I think it's a great show, but I watch it and I say, ‘Why? These people are still alive. They have children. They have families. They have their own hearts and souls. We don't have a right to put their story on screen yet.’"—but she knew Medici’s story was one she wanted to bring to a wider audience. “This show is extraordinary because yes, it's a TV show, it's entertainment, but it’s as much as we can make it historical fact, and that's extraordinary. Catherine was born a shopkeeper's daughter and became the longest-ruling monarch in France, and her stories deserve to be told.”
Morton’s passion for the subject was a large part of what helped her land the role. “The first time that we talked to Samantha, we said, ‘Well, how do you see the show?’” recalls executive producer Erwin Stoff. “She said, ‘I think it's Goodfellas in the Renaissance,’ and that was the thing that blew the doors open for us. That’s exactly how we saw it, and we cast her at the end of that meeting.”
As for how much of Medici’s story The Serpent Queen will explore beyond this first season, Morton’s optimistic. “I hope we get to tell it all because it's incredible,” she says. “There's a complexity to her that I love to play, and also her story gets wilder and wilder, and it's absolutely fascinating.
“With Catherine, it’s a constant game of chess. Some people might find her cold and hard to read, but you have to be patient and see it through to the end to find more of her vulnerabilities and humor. She's the cleverest person in the room at all times, and that's hard because you can't outwit everyone all the time. She doesn't have a big ego; this isn’t narcissism, this is survival.”
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