It’s a foggy March morning in 2023 at Crowhurst Place, a handsome 500-year-old manor house in Surrey with half-timbered walls, high leaded windows and its a and drawbridge. A film crew swarms through the oak-panelled corridors, the camera operator prepares for another take and Julianne Moore — dressed in an extravagant Jacobean gown, her hair bouffant, pearls at her ears and throat — delicately blows her nose. It may be spring, but it’s absolutely freezing and the Oscar-winning star of Still Alice, Boogie Nights and Far From Heaven is used to working in milder climes.
The project that coaxed Moore from her cosy brownstone in New York is Mary & George, a bold and filthy Sky Atlantic mini-series that draws on a relatively unexplored period of British history — the 17th-century reign of James I of England, VI of Scotland — and two of its most compelling figures. Moore plays the scheming noblewoman Mary Villiers, later the Countess of Buckingham, and the British actor Nicholas Galitzine (Purple Hearts, Bottoms) is her beautiful son George, who became the 1st Duke of Buckingham, the king’s favourite and — as Harry Enfield & Chums would put it — also his lover.
A tale of sexually fluid royal confidants in the vein of The Favourite, this seven-part series is full of fruity language, malleable morality and copious shagging. Demure it ain’t. “Take me, bury me, I want to forget who I am,” the king instructs a male companion during a graphic encounter. The production was refused entry to one period property when the owners found out they were shooting an orgy. You can see why they might have balked — one scene set in a French château is a sea of writhing bodies (“Oui! C’est ça!”). The intimacy coordinator was busy.
Moore, 63, plays Mary as shrewd and withering, a rare woman to gain the trust of the king. “If I were a man and I looked like you, I’d rule the f***ing planet,” Mary tells George. Moore’s English accent is impeccable, which won’t surprise anyone who saw her in The End of the Affair or An Ideal Husband.
Today they are filming a sequence in which Mary and family are having their portraits painted. George is late. “He’s in a dirty tavern somewhere,” his brother says. “Or a dirty man.” Moore doesn’t like talking to journalists while she is in the zone — we’ll catch up at a later date — but Liza Marshall, the executive producer, is on hand to tutor me in Jacobean carnal politics as we watch through monitors in the garden.
James, played by the Scottish actor Tony Curran, almost certainly had sex with men, Marshall says. “There are many reports of him fondling boys in public — men were much more affectionate in the Jacobean era. Ben [Benjamin Woolley, on whose historical book about George and James the series is based, to some degree] thinks that’s partly because it was so cold — men would often sleep together.
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“Sodomy was punishable by death, but you had to have two people to prove it. Handjobs and blowjobs — they thought that was totally fine,” adds Marshall, the Bafta-nominated producer of The Long Firm, starring Mark Strong, to whom she is married. “The important point is that nobody defined sexuality back then, it was just something that you did. We see everything through the Victorian lens, but if you go back a couple of hundred years, everyone was way more relaxed about who they were sleeping with. George Villiers really loved sleeping with women and men. It’s really interesting to have women and queer characters at the centre of the narrative.” It’s a creative decision that’s as unapologetically anachronistic as the dialogue.
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George’s ascent was fuelled by English noblemen who resented the sensual Scots that James had brought with him from Edinburgh, especially Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, the king’s de facto prime minister and another man who probably shared his bed. George was seen as a pretty English stooge to replace Somerset. “They found this hot guy who was a nobody,” Marshall says. “People would stop speaking when he entered a room — he was that hot. Everyone thought they could control him, but the power went to his head. He became the most powerful man in England after the king.” After James’s death, George became a trusted aide to his son and successor, Charles I. “He was one of the few commoners in history who went from being the closest adviser of one king to the next.”
His mother, meanwhile, used her son’s success to become the closest woman to James. “The stuff that’s written about her called her evil and a witch because history’s written by the men,” Marshall says. “But women had no power at that time so the fact that she achieved what she did is really extraordinary. She was probably the smartest person in the room.” Mary was buried at Westminster Abbey in 1632 — another mark of her standing.
Almost a year after visiting the set, I talk to Moore over the phone. She is in New York, but en route to Madrid, where she is soon to shoot The Room Next Door with Pedro Almodóvar and Tilda Swinton. Many of the characters in Mary & George, she says, “have a pansexuality, whether they connected with people in a romantic way or sexual way or just in an effort to get ahead. The locus of power was with James, and you saw this desperate jockeying for position where the only place that anyone felt safe was as close as they could get to the king.”
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That pansexuality extends in the show to Mary, who says with a shrug before bedding a woman, “Bodies are just bodies.” Is there evidence that she swung both ways? “Nah, I think they just made that up,” Moore says with a laugh. “It is historical fiction, so we do stretch it a little bit.” This Mary is partial to a spot of poisoning too, which may also be artistic licence.
The actress was certainly coming cold to the Jacobean era. “Oh my God, I knew nothing,” she says. “And the funny thing was, when I spoke to English people they would sheepishly say that they knew nothing too.” The relative obscurity of the Jacobeans was one of the things that drew her to the project, along with the challenge of being the only American in a British-dominated cast and knowing that she had to nail the accent. A dialect coach was on hand at all times.
The series was created by the British playwright and screenwriter David “DC” Moore, whose play about the war in Afghanistan, The Empire, was nominated for an Olivier award in 2010. “David gave it a beating heart,” Moore says.
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Many Jacobean buildings burnt down during the Great Fire of London so the producers had to hunt to find authentic locations. Crowhurst Place stands in for Mary’s London residence, Knole House in Kent for James’s palace and they also shot and they also shot at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, Ham House in Richmond and the Charterhouse in London. “The houses, my God,” Moore says. “Really extraordinary places to visit, let alone work in.”
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There was also the privilege of spitting fake blood into the face of one of our finest actors, Simon Russell Beale, who plays Mary’s unpleasant first husband (she got through three). “Oh, isn’t he awesome,” Moore says. They acted together in An Ideal Husband in 1999. “We hadn’t seen each other for 25 years, but we had the best time” — especially the scene in which they fight and he gets a faceful of her claret.
At the other end of the career scale is Galitzine, 29, soon to be seen playing a boyband star opposite Anne Hathaway in The Idea of You. “He’s just very talented, extraordinarily handsome and really magnetic,” Moore coos.
The hardest thing about playing Mary, she says, was “her Britishness, that’s what’s so dissimilar from me. She also needs to be clever. All the actors also talked about how challenging the language was. David writes really beautiful speech, but it is a challenge, and it needs a kind of a rhythm for it to work.”
She has a point: James is described by one courtier as “a dead-eyed, horny-handed horror who surrounds himself with many deceitful, well-hung beauties”. Try saying that after a pint of mead.
The clothes are as flashy as the dialogue. The dress Moore was wearing at Crowhurst Place was one of more than 60 made for her by the costume designer Annie Symons (The Hollow Crown, The Crimson Petal and the White). “We finished for the day and I had a fitting for something else — it was just a conveyor belt,” Moore says. “My dresses were so big I would have to travel from base camp to the set in a car. And then one day my dress was so enormous I couldn’t even get into the car and they sent a van to collect me.”
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Moore wears her privilege well; she would make an excellent aristocrat. “She’s got such intelligence and power — and a sense of mischief,” Marshall says. “And she’s enjoying playing someone who’s not altogether good.”
All episodes of Mary & George are available on Sky Atlantic and Now from March 5
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