‘It’s taken me a Tudor lifetime’
On set in Hungary, Liz Hoggard learns how a 20year delay to Shardlake meant that the adaptation got its ideal leading man in Arthur Hughes
Given the predilection in television these days for turning bestsellers into bingewatches, it’s something of a shock to realise that it’s taken executive producer Stevie Lee more than two decades to bring C.J. Sansom’s Tudor murder-mystery novels to the screen.
Sansom granted her the rights to his first novel, Dissolution, featuring the lawyer-turned-detective Matthew Shardlake — dubbed the “Tudor Morse” — back in 2003.
It should have been an easy sell. Sansom’s novels have sold more than four million copies. We are obsessed with dramas about the Tudors. And Shardlake, like Morse, is a brilliant, flawed anti-hero.
His decency and sense of honour shine in a world of flattery and hypocrisy (his creator was a lawyer for many years, representing the less privileged). But Shardlake is also disabled (he has curvature of the spine), which marks him out as an outsider in superstitious 16th-century England.
Lee planned to make a film with Kenneth Branagh as Shardlake. But despite the backing of the BFI and “Ken’s name and total passion for it”, she couldn’t get it made.
In 2007, the BBC optioned the novels, with Branagh attached again. But then it announced it was adapting Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Shardlake was deemed too similar, so Branagh signed up for
Wallander instead.
ITV was keen, but couldn’t make the money work. It was only when Lee joined forces with the production company The Forge (National Treasure, Help) that things started moving again. Last year, Disney+ finally greenlit the drama. “It’s taken me a Tudor lifetime to get it made,” Lee laughs.
Shardlake has an enviable supporting cast: Sean Bean as Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell; Peter Firth as the Duke of Norfolk; Paul Kaye as Brother Jerome; and Babou Ceesay as Abbot Fabian.
One quirk of having to wait so long to make
Shardlake is that the producers felt emboldened to cast a disabled actor — Arthur Hughes — in the lead role, rather than a Branagh. Indeed, casting an ablebodied actor as Shardlake might now be considered an insult — just look at the recent furore when it was announced that the Globe’s artistic director, Michelle Terry, an able-bodied actress, would be playing the title role in Richard III.
“In the current climate, both Disney and The Forge felt we should have an actor with a disability playing the part of Shardlake,” says the producer John Griffin. “And Arthur, who was at the RSC playing Richard III, was becoming available, so he was an obvious person to approach.”
Hughes already has a promising television career, plus a CV that includes stage roles at the RSC and the Globe. But playing Matthew Shardlake will catapult him to another league. “Shardlake is wonderful,” Hughes enthuses. “He has ideals that are more modern than the time he lives in. He’s like a lie detector, he can just tell when someone’s lying.”
At 32, Hughes is 10 years younger and a lot hotter than Sansom’s original hero. In the TV drama, the lawyer-sleuth rides hard and fights with swords. But Hughes clearly feels an affinity with Shardlake’s physical challenges.
“When you’re a disabled actor playing a disabled part, you do have that lived experience. You know what it’s like not to be picked for something or to be stared at or made to feel different. You have to generate your own self-confidence engine, which has to be five times bigger than everyone else’s. To really love yourself, instead of hating yourself. My personal journey is one of going, ‘Is my disability something that’s holding me back or taking me forward?’ Shardlake has that journey.”
Shardlake suffers the indignity of being abused as a “crookback” and a “hunchback” by courtiers and servants. But those words were never used between actors and crew, Griffin stresses, “We wrote a thing on the front of the scripts to say he is described in the series as a hunchback, that’s what characters call him. But we talk about his ‘condition’. He’s playing a guy who has scoliosis.”
For Hughes it was an important gesture. “Disabled people don’t like to be called these archaic names. I think people should always do this in productions if there’s ever anything like this. Because language is powerful, certainly with the representation of disability.”
As the four-part drama opens, the king has broken with Rome, and a team of commissioners, led by Cromwell, is investigating the monasteries.
When one commissioner is found dead, head severed from his body, at the monastery of Scarnsea on the Sussex coast, Shardlake has to solve the crime. A passionate reformer, he is loyal to Cromwell. But his investigation forces him to question everything.
Disney+ is hoping for a hit (there are six more novels, after all).
Shardlake starts on Disney+ on May 1