Imagining a 20-something Shakespeare.

Every newly minted actor dreams of playing Shakespeare. But Laurie Davidson realized that dream in spades. No, he’s not playing Romeo or Berowne or even Puck. Davidson is actually playing Shakespeare in TNT’s new series, “Will,” whcih premiered Monday.

As envisioned by writer Craig Pearce and director Shekhar Kapur, this is a jazzy version of the 20-something Shakespeare as he pounces on London and prepares to take on the town.

Davidson was still in drama school when he landed the part after six auditions. But he says he performed several roles from the Bard as a student. “I’ve grown up with it, and I have seen, living in London, a lot of his plays. So having that love for Shakespeare, when this job came along, it was, like, incredible,” he says.

“And as a first job, it’s been brilliant. I’ve been so looked after. And just getting that screen time it’s been amazing. And to get to play someone like William Shakespeare, someone I’ve grown up reading, doing his plays in my training, that’s been amazing.”

This is not your father’s Shakespeare, says Davidson. “We have to remember we are seeing him before everything we know about this guy. We’ve had 400 years in our minds to go, ‘He was this great, this person, this literary genius.’ But we are seeing him right at the beginning of that story where he doesn’t even know himself or where it’s going to end up. So I think, in that way, it has to be a very different person from the history books.”

In fact, the history books are lacking says Pearce, a longtime writing partner with fellow Australian Baz Luhrmann. “So little is known about this most famous person, He’s the most famous person in the world that no one really knows anything about except for a few facts. And then beyond that, there’s a lot of speculation,” says Pearce.

“There’s not one letter, not one personal diary entry written by him that survived. So all we have is his vast body of work. And it’s a little bit like the Bible. You read into that work what you want to read into it because, really, he wrote about everything. In the beginning … he was just struggling to find who he was and to find his voice like so many of us today.”

Pearce has been developing this undertaking for 10 years. “And I did an enormous amount of research,” he says. “And we all did as we joined the project. And I don’t think there’s anything in terms of what happens to Shakespeare in the show that an historian could point to and say, ‘That absolutely DIDN’T happen.’ So we’ve stuck within the broad parameters of the history and then made imaginative leaps from what we do know.”

“History is always interpretation,” adds Kapur, known best for his two films about the first Queen Elizabeth. “If you cannot take history and interpret it to our modern times, it has no relevance,” he says.

“So you have to each time history is created, it’s interpreted for that generation, for that moment. So we’ve taken Shakespeare, whatever we know, and interpreted it for us, for this generation and now.”