Hulu takes on Catherine the Great
Sometimes history can be so boring that nobody wants to hear about it. But Hulu plans to change all that when it presents its new 10-part “biography” of Catherine the Great, available today.
This is not the sternly sagacious Empress of Russia that audiences have seen before with Helen Mirren, or Catherine Zeta-Jones, or Bette Davis, or even Marlene Dietrich.
No, this is former child actress Elle Fanning, now grown up. And “The Great” is a comedy. What's more, it's not even historically accurate, says creator Tony McNamara. “When I see people tying their shoes with ribbons, I wanna kill myself,” he says.
“So I was like, ‘What would I watch? What would be exciting for me? A period show about a great character. But how would we do that in a way that twisted the genre a little bit and made it a show I would watch? And my 21-year-old daughter would watch, and people who liked history could watch as well — but it was all about the characters?'”
Comedy is new to Fanning, 22, who literally cut her teeth in films like “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Daddy Day Care.”
“That did take a bit of getting used to for me of getting into the rhythm and, of course, the delicious writing, and it's all there and you just have to say it,” she says.
“For me, sometimes I want to stretch things out. I'm like, ‘All right, I want to take a pause here and say this speech and really (slow down).' And it's like, 'OK, let's just speed it up and say it really quick.' And it always works so much better that way … And also I had to learn, I think, with comedy also not to feel embarrassed. I've learned so much in the process of this in bringing my walls down and going for it a bit more,” Fanning says.
The Australian McNamara, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay “The Favourite,” says, “I think when I started, the reason I wanted to do it was because basically I knew one thing about Catherine the Great, which was maybe she fornicated with a horse. And then I also found out everything about her.”
What he discovered, he says, is that history's impression of her is skewed. “She went to a country she didn't even know. She took it over. She started female education. She kept the Enlightenment alive. She invented the roller coaster. I was, like, well, that's the story. And it also seemed a contemporary story because the received wisdom about her is a terrible lie and defines who everyone saw her as. But she was this quite incredible woman. So that seemed like a fascinating story to tell for us. But I also didn't want to get bogged down in all the detail …
“And what I've talked about is finding really specific things we wanted to deal with that she did. And (I planned to) get to the true essence of those massive things that she did, but not get bogged down in all the really small detail so that it gets sort of boringly historical.”
He thinks hers is actually a contemporary tale. “It's like who are these people when they wake up? On one level, she's Catherine the Great who marries Peter the Great and that's a big story,” he says.
“On another level that's quite contemporary, it's about a woman who marries the wrong person and then has to go, ‘What do I do? Do I kill him?' And that seemed a contemporary question.”
McNamara doesn't apologize for veering off the truth. “As long as I feel like we're truly telling a version of her story that is historically accurate here and there, and there's certain sort of tent poles that we try and hit … It isn't a perfectly historically accurate document. That's not what we're trying to do. Other shows have done that, and that's not what we're trying to do,” he says.
While much of the series is McNamara's invention, some of it is actually right on, he says. “There's also lots of details that are completely strange that turn out to be true. Like odd methods of contraception and odd methods of pregnancy testing that are so bizarre you think we made them up, but they're all kind of accurate. It's peppered with lots of detail that is true, and then how we tell the story is of our own making.”