Wolf Hall FUN arrived in the US in January with a new hashtag in the King Henry’s hands: #WolfHallPBS And, it is arriving, finally, in our living rooms this Sunday at 10pm on PBS Masterpiece Theater!
And… The King has just spoken, ladies and gentlemen!
See the MOST hilarious tweet from PBS with HenryVIII inviting us all to watch Wolf Hall 🙂
Take heed of your king's (@Lewis_Damian) warning.#WolfHallPBS premieres April 5th on @masterpiecepbs. pic.twitter.com/qRgAN3z5I9
— PBS (@PBS) April 1, 2015
As I cannot wait for my date with Henry, I am, in fact, reading Wolf Hall nowadays for a second time and falling in love with Hilary Mantel’s wonderful prose and brilliant sense of humor all over again. I HIGHLY recommend a parallel reading to anyone that’s up for it!
Now… You already know what’s coming if you have read the books. If not, please please do not get upset, in case you are tuning in for Damian Lewis, when you don’t get to see Henry VIII as often as you want in Wolf Hall, in particular the first episode.
Gaby Wood reports in a recent Telegraph article:
“Lewis compares playing Henry VIII to being a substitute on a football team – in particular, he compares him to ‘Supersub’ David Fairclough, who played for Liverpool in the 1970s and 1980s. ‘He was a redhead,’ he says, identifying closely with the footballer. ‘He rarely started a game for Liverpool – he was always a substitute, and he had a knack for coming on and scoring a winner. And I feel that in this version, it’s a bit like what Henry VIII is. He comes on occasionally, dazzles, and goes away again.”
Having said that, even in the scenes that he is not physically present, you constantly feel the King’s presence. Because, everyone is constantly talking about him. About his marriage… About his obsession with a male heir… About his mistress… Henry is there even when he is not there.
Take episode 1: Three Card Trick. Let’s take a quick look at the plot.
“Thomas Cromwell’s patron, Cardinal Wolsey, is dismissed as lord chancellor and forced to flee his palace at York Place. The old noble families of England, jealous of their own right to advise the king, have long waited for this moment. His hopes of returning to the king’s favour lie with the ever-loyal Thomas Cromwell.
Eight years ago, when Cromwell started working for Wolsey, the cardinal made an enemy of Thomas Boleyn by chastising him for his daughter Anne’s far-from-virtuous reputation. As rumours circulated in court that Anne was secretly betrothed to Harry Percy, the cardinal insisted that no such match would be allowed.
Still lacking a male heir, the king is desperate for an annulment from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, claiming she was not a virgin on their wedding day. To Cromwell’s dismay, the cardinal’s efforts to persuade the Pope to grant the annulment are fruitless. An alliance between the Pope and Katherine’s nephew, the holy Roman emperor, diminishes the cardinal’s position even further.
As Henry grows impatient, the pressure increases on the cardinal. To add to this, rumours reach the cardinal that the king’s new mistress is Anne Boleyn, who has sworn vengeance on him over Harry Percy.
Cromwell visits Anne, urging her that only the cardinal can secure what she wants, but Anne is unmoved. The duke of Norfolk, nervous of the cardinal’s continuing proximity to the king, insists that Cromwell tell Wolsey to travel north to his archdiocese in York. A desperate Cromwell finally meets directly with Henry, but the king is nothing if not ambiguous. Will he recall the cardinal, or turn on him?”
See? The king is all over the episode even though he appears for the first time and only briefly in the last scene when Cromwell finally gets to meet him.
What kind of a Henry do we get to meet? Firstly, we will have a skinny, athletic king with some killer calves 🙂 This is a version of Henry that is different from, in Damian Lewis’ words “syphilitic, philandering Elvis people think [Henry VIII] is.”
Lewis, at a tea party held at British Consul-General Chris O’Connor’s LA home on January 18, observes: “He [Henry VIII] was one of the best hunters, horsemen, jousters, archers. And he was an incredibly trim, fit man — very proud of a fine pair of calves that he had. He used to boast that his calves were better than Philip the Fair’s of France.”
He adds at the TCA Winter Press Tour: ““Henry, as a brand, is right up there with Coca Cola. In terms of brand recognition, you have to go look at other things, and I think we have.”
So, what kind of “other things” should we expect?
Damian Lewis explains in an interview with LA Times that “It’s a bit like we get the 20 greatest hits of Henry’s emotional mood changes. We see him tender and playing a lute and composing a song, we see him losing his … at Cromwell, we see him on a horse, we see him laughing, we see him being a father and loving. I was like, ‘Wow, we may never have seen him quite as well-rounded as this.” Because he’s not there all the time, these moments register very strongly. They’re little crystallized moments.”
Damian Lewis, talks more on Wolf Hall‘s Henry, in BBC’s media pack: “Henry’s not in it very much but when we see him there’s great variety in his character and his personality – you might see him composing something on the lute, you might see him in a very boyish way, sort of dreaming about Jane Seymour. We see him at times frightened by the memory of his mother and I think these are little insights that people won’t be used to, you know, and yet there are the similar things there, the vanity is still there, the self importance. The fact that he believed himself to be a divine presence on earth ending in the act of supremacy where he was, not only now God and King but always had been. So to him it was a retroactive bill that he passed.”
So, Wolf Hall‘s Henry is both a god-like king and a tender man as we talked about earlier here. And, believe me… He’s a KEEPER!
My fellow Damian Lewis fans! Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride 🙂
Wow, the intelligence with which DL talks about the role leaves nearly no room for commentary from us mere mortal audience members!
Can’t wait to see what folks on this side of the pond think about this beautifully done series!
Totally with you! I just LOVE the way he talks about any role he is in – this guy knows what he’s talking about. Smart and articulate — for a nerdy girl like me, this is beyond sexy 🙂
Don’t even get me started. That little twitter video? Good. Ness.
Indeed 😀