On the occasion of the release of “The Queen’s Game”, here are five things to know about this period film directed by Alicia Vikander and Jude Law.
What is it about ? Catherine Parr is the sixth wife of King Henry VIII, whose previous wives were either repudiated or beheaded (only one having died following illness). With the help of her ladies in waiting, she tries to foil the traps set for her by the bishop, the court and the king…
A Swede in the shoes of an Englishwoman
For Karim Aïnouz, Alicia Vikander’s Swedish nationality gave the role of Catherine Parr a new perspective: “The first thing she brings is that she’s not English and for me that was exciting. There was a little sense of revenge in seeing a foreign person playing an English person.”, says the director. He pursues :
“After all these films about Egypt with Elizabeth Taylor, I said to myself that it was time to turn things around! Alicia brought something that is very close to what I imagined, a very calm and discreet presence, but also very strong and mysterious. She brings a lot of opacity and I would never have been able to do a correct portrait of Catherine Parr without this element of mystery.”
Note that Michelle Williams was the first to play Catherine Parr. But for scheduling reasons, the one who delivered a large number of memorable performances, such as for example in The Secret of Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine, Certain Women or The Fabelmans, was forced to withdraw in favor of Alicia Vikander.
Catherine Parr on screen
With the exception of the 1933 feature film, The Private Life of Henry VIII, the character of Catherine Parr has until then only been represented on screen in series: The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), The Tudors (where she is played by Joely Richardson) and Becoming Elizabeth (played by Jessica Raine).
Adaptation
The genesis of the film began even before Elizabeth Fremantle’s novel, The Queen’s Game, published in 2012, has not been published. Producer Gabrielle Tana had read the proofs and immediately posed an option to bring it to the screen. She decided to turn to Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Aïnouz:
“I thought of him because I didn’t want another English period film. I dreamed of a visceral film about human relationships. He immersed himself in this past without preconceived ideas and he brought to history a very modern vision”.
After carrying out extensive research, the director decided to focus on the last months of the king’s life, four years after his union with Catherine Parr, in order to tell the story of the end of a marriage, rather than delivering a classic biopic .
Brouhaha Entertainment Jude Law and Alicia Vikander
The castle
The production spent many months visiting all the majestic locations of the Tudor and Middle Ages in the UK. The entire film was filmed at Haddon Hall. “With Haddon Hall, we had a distant castle where a woman tries to escape a monster, the classic setting for a psychological thriller about an abusive relationship”confides set designer Helen Scott, to whom Karim Aïnouz had given the tale of Bluebeard as a key reference.
A stubborn smell
Jude Law requested that unpleasant odors be released onto the set, so that everyone present would smell the dirt and rot on their bodies: “You could tell everyone had a visceral reaction to that environment, which helped us all play.”