![]() ![]() “I gave a show-and-tell to a lot of people. ![]() ![]() “She had this idea of serving macarons off her pregnant stomach while walking around in a bridge pose.” Taking pride in her party trick, Fanning says she pitched it four times to the director and writers. ![]() “Elle decided she needed Catherine to do something crazy that she’d regret in the morning, to show that her character had ‘lost herself’ at the party,” says Hoult. The empress spends much of this season attempting to usurp her husband’s popularity and proving she can be a hoot. “But also, he’s just falling more and more in love with Catherine each time he sees her strategicness, ruthlessness and ability to be his match.” As the series progresses, however, Catherine’s enlightened ideas – female education, freeing the serfs, ending civil bloodshed – prove too radical for the court, which very much misses the good old days of death and debauchery. “ still believes himself to have wonderful plans in the works,” Hoult explains. “It’s really easy – he’s a simple, simple man.” And just like that, Catherine has the power she so badly wanted: “Now what are you going to do with it? Are you even going to be a good leader? That’s something she’s grappling with – becoming a mother both to Russia and to her own child.”Ĭonvinced that this is a temporary state of affairs, and excited about becoming a father, Peter willingly becomes Catherine’s prisoner in his rooms, where she also uses him as her willing sexual servant. “I bait him out of hiding with roasted food,” explains Fanning. Peter eventually abdicates because … well, he’s very hungry. As bored children kick a decapitated head around as entertainment, it’s clear that not much has changed. The second season picks up four months later, with the civil war at a standstill. When Peter captured her lover, however, Catherine was further fuelled by rage, and the gunshot signal was fired. There was just one more problem: she was pregnant. Soon – not long after Peter’s failed attempt to drown her – Catherine resolved to transform Russia by taking over as empress, forming a motley crew to stage a coup. Unperturbed, she tried to fulfil her duties, even keeping her cool when her new love served the head of a Swedish soldier on a silver platter for dinner. Season one saw the dazzlingly intelligent, progressive Catherine leave Germany for Russia, finding herself utterly repulsed by the casually violent yet pitifully dim Peter. Nicholas Hoult and Douglas Hodge in The Great. Meanwhile, Hollywood star Fanning is perfectly cast as Catherine, appearing much older than her 23 years, but always with an air of youthful mischief. Hoult, 31, was cast after nailing the “flamboyant, cruel egotist in a wig” role of the Earl of Oxford in The Favourite. A racy, raucous and not-at-all historically accurate comedy-drama shot through with feminist revisionism, it tweaks and embellishes the story of how Catherine the Great (Fanning) overthrew Hoult’s Peter to become Russia’s longest serving female leader. In fact, as they recall other decorations – a baby’s teddy bear said to be “made from a real bear”, and the mummified remains of Hoult’s onscreen mother, wheeled around in a glass case – the portrait and sculpture start to sound normal, even mundane, by comparison.Ĭreated by Tony McNamara – co-writer of the Oscar-winning film The Favourite – The Great isn’t your average period drama. His co-star Elle Fanning giggles as she admits pinching a sculpture of herself made of butter (“I receive a lifesize version in the show, but I just took the little one”). Gladly it isn’t some kind of big-headed shrine to himself, but rather a prop he took from the set of The Great, the gory and garish TV show in which he stars as the Russian emperor Peter III. “That’s very, very normal,” the actor deadpans, before breaking into a laugh. A t the top of the stairs in his Los Angeles home, a portrait of Nicholas Hoult in military regalia hangs on the wall. ![]()
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