‘Victoria’ documents a queen who struggled to have it all
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When women’s liberation came along, it assured the fairer sex they could have it all. They could chair board meetings, set government policy, bear children and still have a pot roast on the stove. The only problem was, they were 100 years too late.
Queen Victoria, the monarch who served England for 63 years, already did it. While she was expanding the reaches of the British Empire, she was increasing the local population by bearing nine children.
How she managed those demands is the theme of “Masterpiece’s” second season of “Victoria.”
“It’s no fun being pregnant all the time, especially when you’re queen and you’ve got this very demanding job,” says Daisy Goodwin, who created and wrote the series.
Victoria assiduously kept a diary, and much of the source material for the show is culled from that, says Goodwin. “The moment you’re pregnant, as she says, and you swell up like a pumpkin, everyone goes, ‘Ugh, you’ve got hormones. You can’t rule the country anymore.’ So that’s what she hates. She hates that loss of status and control that happens while you’re pregnant and just afterward,” says the British-born Goodwin.
“She doesn’t want to go on the ‘mommy’ track ever. That’s the thing about Victoria. She wants to get back and get back to work.”
While she loved her children, Goodwin says Victoria was a woman in desperate need of contraception. “Her second baby was conceived pretty much a month after she’s given birth to Vicky, so she has two babies in under a year. And for anybody, that’s hard. And she has post-natal depression after the second baby. So her relationship with her children was complicated. She loves them passionately, but she’s not gushy about them,” she says.
“There’s a line in one of her diaries where she says, ‘Newborn infants look like frogs to me.’ I mean, she’s a little scared of them. And you’ve got to remember, she’s only 21. You know, she’s 21 and she’s had two children. And in real life, she has five children in four years, so that’s a lot.”
British actress Jenna Coleman plays Queen Victoria. “I did lot of research on Victoria — how creative she was, which I never knew,” says Coleman.
“She had such passion for music and opera and ballet and visuals. She created her own wedding dress, and wrote in her diary, and did watercolor and sketch, and she tried to learn how to sing opera,” she says.
“She had people come around to the house and teach her. She’s so vibrant and full of life and unapologetically full of life, never tried to hide it or pull back from it, which I really love about her. She’s really inconsistent and very flawed, but I love that,” she smiles.
“I think that’s what’s been quite tricky to play her, being unashamedly flawed. I’m trying to make that likable. It’s really tricky. But it’s who she was, and it’s what makes her so marvelous.”