Winchester Palace, seat of the Saxon King Alfred, sometime in the late 9th century. Flaming torches line walls on which faded Roman frescoes can still be made out. A group of conquering Vikings in furs and helmets lurk in the corner, their wounds and blackened faces suggesting a recent battle. Alfred is nowhere to be seen, having fled into exile. In the centre of the room three more Vikings sit at a table with Aethelwold, Alfred’s worried-looking young nephew. The oldest and hairiest of the trio points a sword at the boy and places a crown on his head. “If you want to be king then you must kill him.”
“Cut! Lovely. Very nice,” says the director, puncturing the tension with some British luvvie-speak. It’s the height of summer in a studio outside Budapest, towards the end of the shoot for The Last Kingdom, a BBC adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s bestselling Saxon Stories novels in which the smouldering Alexander Dreymon as Uhtred of Bebbanburg aims to do for the Dark Ages what Sean Bean did for the Napoleonic Wars in the adaptations of Cornwell’s Sharpe books. The series, which has premiered on BBC America to strong reviews and starts here tomorrow, taps into the same seam of medieval brutality and black-hearted morals as Game of Thrones does. One thing it isn’t is “very nice”.
The first eight-part season (everyone is hopeful there will be more) is being produced by Carnival Films (Downton Abbey) and is adapted by Stephen Butchard (Good Cop, House of Saddam). It focuses on a turbulent yet neglected period in our history: the years after the departure of the Romans and before the arrival of the Normans, when England was a collection of smaller kingdoms, beset by Norse invaders.
Wessex is the last kingdom in question, ruled by Alfred, infamous burner of cakes, who rose to become monarch of a united England. Alfred, played by David Dawson, has a significant part in the series, but the protagonist — and a dashing new Poldark in the making — is Dreymon’s Uhtred. The son of a Saxon nobleman, he is abducted and raised by Vikings and torn between the two cultures, the first measured and Christian, the second wild and pagan.
Uhtred’s story embodies the upheavals of the time, which remain largely unexplored, Cornwell says. “People in England simply do not know where England comes from. We’re not taught about the Saxon period, apart from Alfred being a bad cook. I think it’s a story that’s worth knowing. Something happened between 850 and 950 — the creation of the country that we call England.”
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It’s all being recreated in a country that we call Hungary, with its cheaper costs, expert craftsmen and relatively pylon-free countryside. “It’s hugely ambitious for a BBC drama; you couldn’t actually afford to do it in England,” says Chrissy Skinns, the producer, sitting outside in the canteen truck during a break in filming. Lower wages meant they could have 150 crew members on set — in England it would be 80. “It’s basically an army filming an army,” Skinns says as a flock of priests walk by in the sunshine, sweating in their woollen robes.
The production values are certainly impressive: an entire village, built from scratch; viking ships in full sail; a grimly graphic battle between Saxons and Vikings. Although The Last Kingdom doesn’t quite have the wow factor of Game of Thrones (the producers won’t say what the budget is, but it’s a fraction of the HBO show’s £5 million per episode), the world it depicts is almost as unpleasant. Young men pay for indiscretions with their eyes, heads are severed, children are burnt, enemies are crucified and there’s a Thrones-like willingness to kill off significant characters without warning.
“Life is nasty, brutish and short,” Cornwell says. “Uhtred keeps looking at the Roman remains and saying, ‘These were giants; they did things that we can’t do.’ There’s a feeling that they’re sliding back into chaos and darkness.”
It’s not fanciful to compare the series with George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones, Cornwell says, “because George’s background for Game of Thrones is actually medieval England”. Note the familiar “George”; these two big beasts of genre fiction are “very friendly”, Cornwell says. “George has been incredibly generous in his comments about my books.”
Some might be disappointed to learn, however, that The Last Kingdom will not be going in for the “sexposition” made famous by Game of Thrones on TV. “We’re not going to have loads of naked women sitting round the set while we explain what’s going on,” Cornwell says (although Uhtred does have a roll around in a forest with Brida, his “friend with benefits”, as Dreymon calls her). “The difference is that we are telling a real story, however loosely. That gives it a hardness that Game of Thrones lacks.”
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There is also a topical emphasis on immigration and national identity. The short-haired, sensibly dressed Saxons are played by British actors, including Matthew Macfadyen, Jason Flemyng and Ian Hart. The Vikings are played by Scandinavians (plus the Dutchman Rutger Hauer as an elder) and styled like New Age travellers: tattoos, leathers, long hair and braided beards. “They were the rock stars of the time,” Dreymon says, lolling in a trailer between scenes. Dressed in boots, breeches, goatee, hair extensions and man bun, he has a touch of the rock star himself, crossed with east London hipster.
“The British guys have trained in the British schools and you get a certain rigour from that,” Dreymon says. The Scandinavian actors, meanwhile, are “completely off their t**s. In a good way. It brings a lot of colour to the show.”
Caught in the middle is Uhtred, the displaced migrant of the piece. The producers deliberately cast an actor who is neither British nor Scandinavian; Dreymon was born in Germany, grew up in France, Switzerland and America, trained in London and lives in Los Angeles. That gives him a worldliness that many of his peers lack, Skinns says. “They often feel younger because they haven’t had the life experience someone in those days would have had.”
Dreymon says he speaks to his American girlfriend in an American accent and to his UK friends in a British accent, “and I don’t feel like I’m putting it on”. For this show he made up a new one: “British with a European twang.”
To go with his ambiguous nationality, the 33-year-old has an unambiguous sex appeal. Skinns thinks Dreymon has the look of a young Brad Pitt; I reckon more Orlando Bloom, although Dreymon is a better, grittier actor. “Somebody I know who’s a fan of the books said, ‘I hope you’re not going to make him too pretty, like Poldark,’ ” Skinns says. “So we’ve scarred and messed him up.” Some of the scars are real, including one on his face where he was clouted by a shield.
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Dreymon — best known for the US series American Horror Story and for playing Christopher Isherwood’s lover opposite Matt Smith in Christopher and His Kind — seems to be something of a method actor. To get into character for Uhtred, an upstanding type “who can also be a bit of a c***”, he wandered around Budapest shouting at tourists and snuck into confession boxes in churches to surprise people. He modelled the character’s hair-trigger temper on Tony Soprano’s. One poor soul pays a hefty price for a minor slight. “I start killing him with my horse, then I jump down and stab him in the chest.”
Such commitment, together with his workload (he’s in most scenes) have taken their toll. At the start of the shoot Dreymon was doing push-ups and “running up hills” in his downtime; now, “between scenes I’ll put my fur down on the floor and go to sleep with my sword as a pillow”.
Still, if the early episodes are anything to go by, the toil was worthwhile. When we speak, Cornwell hasn’t seen any of Dreymon’s performance. “I just know he’s incredibly good-looking and I suspect he only got the part because he looks like me,” he says with a laugh.
He is entirely ready, though, for the portrayal to influence how he writes the Saxon Stories (the ninth book, Warriors of the Storm, was published this month). “Sean Bean changed the way I wrote Sharpe,” he says, and Dreymon and Co “are going to bring things that change the way I think about these characters”.
The Last Kingdom, Thursday October 21, BBC Two, 9pm