FX debuts swordfest ‘The Bastard Executioner’
Say what you will about the religious and royal authorities in 14th century Wales, they were not soft on crime.
When they capture a 15-yearold girl suspected of aiding Welsh rebels in FX’s new drama “The Bastard Executioner,” she is placed in a cage.
To encourage her to reveal where the rebels are, or what their plans may be, the men in charge lay out a buffet of metal devices designed to, among other things, tear out her fingernails and rip open her private parts.
Should she still decline to discuss the rebel situation, they will slice her head off. No sir, no coddling terrorists here. The implementation of the steps in this process falls to one Wilkin Brattle (Lee Jones), called The Punisher by his peers and soon to be known to 21st century television viewers by the blunter name of the Bastard Executioner.
The new 10-part drama from Kurt Sutter launches Tuesday night at 10 p.m., with a double episode.
As fans of Sutter’s recently concluded “Sons of Anarchy” might guess, this is not “Downton Abbey.”
“Nothing wrong with a little colorful brutality,” says Sutter, joking and not joking.
“It’s a medieval setting,” he says. “Their laws in terms of punishment were brutal and heinous. That’s a reality of the world.
“And there are ways to portray that violence that don’t make it openly gratuitous. Whatever happens, battle scenes or an execution or torture, it comes out of the story. Once we see the character’s conflict and/or nonconflict, it has some ramification, an emotional ramification for the character or an impact on the narrative.”
He chose 14th century Wales, he says, for a couple of reasons other than violence.
First, it was long ago and far away from contemporary California, where he spent seven seasons with the SAMCRO motorcycle club in “Sons” and several prior seasons on “The Shield.”
Second, he says, “I love history,” and he was particularly fascinated by the Plantagenets, who ruled England from 1154 to 1485.
“They were so f---ed up,” he says. “It was nuts. And there was no way to write any of it into a TV show. So we created a story that showed the context of the times.”
“It’s a fictional story and a fictional character in a very real Wales,” says Paris Barclay, the director who also collaborated with Sutter on “Sons.”
It’s also, Barclay admits, a complex story.
“I didn’t want something quick and easy,” Barclay says. “That’s what I did with ‘Glee,’ and that was fine. But we wanted to go deeper here.”
Jones’ Brattle is himself a knight and warrior, until he sees what he takes to be a divine sign that he should lay down his sword and pick up a plowshare.
He doesn’t get much chance to test this new lifestyle before British soldiers, working under the ambitious King Edward I, slaughter his family and his village.
That thrusts Brattle into an odd world that includes his British oppressors, the spiritual guide Annora (Katey Sagal, in long wavy grey hair) and the devious Lord Chamberlain Milus Corbett (Stephen Moyer) — not to mention various family, friends, allies, foes and passersby.
In a broad sense it calls to mind the cast Sutter built around Charlie Hunnam’s Jax Teller in “Sons of Anarchy.”
“Yes, it’s the same thing I did with Jax,” says Sutter. “The show is an ensemble, but you have one singular character whose journey and relationships drive the story.”
For “Sons of Anarchy” fans that may put considerable pressure on Jones, who will inevitably be compared to his fellow Australian Hunnam, who was widely agreed to be smoking hot.
Before getting this role, Jones was virtually unknown outside Australia, where he made his reputation primarily as a stage actor in productions like 2013’s “Frankenstein.” “I was looking to try something different,” says the soft-spoken Jones. “I was hoping a role that was physical and gritty would find me. And it certainly did.”
While his stage experience helped prepare him for requirements like the battle scenes, he admits that “I went into training before we started filming — and it’s a good thing I did.”
It isn’t the macho swordplay, though, that he finds most intriguing about Brattle.
“His life is emotionally draining as well,” says Jones. “He’s surrounded by death and tragedy. How do you deal with that? Does he become desensitized to it?”
Jones says he’s not sure he knows the answer yet — whether chopping off all those heads, not to mention juggling a secret life and a bit of romance as well, will lead Brattle to a happier place or a dead end.
“I know how things developed to here,” he says. “But I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t know the end-game. In that way, of course, it’s quite different than playing a character in the theater.”
Sutter allows that he does have an idea where Brattle is going, though that doesn’t mean he knows every stone on the path or that the audience should get too comfortable in its expectations.
“What’s fun for me as a storyteller,” Sutter says, “is to have characters and relationships where everything is understood. I love the mythol'Where’s Karl?,' a cheeky book out Tuesday, copycats the wildly popular “Where’s Waldo?” kids’
book series, subbing in designer Karl Lagerfeld ogy of that, the order to it.
“That also means there may be things that don’t seem to make sense in the immediate context of one episode. But in the larger mythology, they do.”
One of the things that’s great about a 10-hour series, he says, is there’s room to explore historical matters like the way Roman Catholicism was spreading in the Middle Ages.
“It’s fascinating to me,” says Sutter. “People had held other beliefs for hundreds of years, so one of the things the Catholic Church did was use icons and images from the pagans, essentially to make their new religion more comfortable and easier to sell.”
“We know the broader outline of history,” says Barclay. “What wasn’t documented from these times was day-to-day lives. Which were very hard. We have room to do that here, which gives us a much better story.”
Whether “The Bastard Executioner” will catch on with 21st century television audiences is, of course, the next question.
Some of that may depend on whether audiences are willing to watch long enough to understand the players and the lineups in 14th century Wales.
Some of it may depend, more basically, on whether Sutter fans latch onto Jones the way they latched onto Hunnam.
Jones admits he “never saw much” of “Sons of Anarchy,” but he knew from the beginning that “Bastard Executioner” would at times turn as hard and brutal as its name.
“When we’ve finished shooting, we’ll joke around on the set,” he says. “And I’ll tell you, after a lot of these scenes you need a laugh.”