BLADES OF GLORY
Sacré bleu! Those dashing Musketeers are back – and look who’s playing the villain... isn’t that the new Doctor Who?
PETER Capaldi sure knows how to keep a secret. Two weeks before he is unveiled as the new Doctor Who, I meet him in the Czech Republic, on the set of the BBC’s new ten-episode drama The Musketeers.
As will later become clear, Capaldi already knows one of TV’s top acting jobs is safely in the bag. The production crew and cast know ‘something is in the air’ but Capaldi’s lips are firmly sealed. As screenwriter Adrian Hodges later says: ‘Anything involving Doctor Who is like a state secret. It was more than his life was worth to let on.’
Fittingly for a newly ennobled Time Lord, Capaldi is no stranger to heading i nto the distant past for a role, having played Leonardo da Vinci, King Charles I and Robert Louis Stevenson on TV. In The Musketeers, Capaldi plays Cardinal Richelieu, the Machiavellian French clergyman who becomes Louis XIII’s first minister in 17th-Century France.
On set in the gardens of the imposingly baroque 17thCentury Slavkov Castle near the Czech-Slovak border, the late summer heat is oppressive and Capaldi, seated at a banqueting table, sweats it out in heavy ceremonial robes. He’s finding the 1600s tough.
‘I don’t think I would have been great,’ he tells me. ‘I would have enjoyed the frocks and some of the food, but the disease and hygiene would have worried me.’
Capaldi has his own war wounds from a shoot dogged by heatwaves and flooding, rats the size of cats and various swashbuckling injuries. ‘The production suffered a few injuries,’ he reveals. ‘Dislocated shoulders, bruised shins, concussion. It’s an occupational hazard of being in a swashbuckler.
‘I suffered a nasty dislocated thumb, but embarrassingly not from swinging a sword. It came from a domestic with Milady [Maimie McCoy]. I threw her against the wall, not realising I’d caught my thumb in her frock.
‘I felt a jab of pain. And when the director said “Cut!” I looked down and saw my thumb was on the wrong way round. Nasty. Instinct took over and I shoved it back into place. Which made my eyes water and my knees weak.’
While Capaldi suffers, the other main stars are rehearsing an upcoming sword fight. For the actors playing The Musketeers and d’Artagnan, the production has been a baptism of fire, with two gruelling weeks of boot camp in a remote castle outside Prague. As producer Colin Wratten says, ‘ When boot camp was mentioned, the boys had visions of Louis Gossett Jr staring at Richard Gere doing push-ups in the mud in An Officer And A Gentleman.’ As it turned out, they weren’t far off.
‘ Boot camp was i ntense,’ says Howard Charles, who plays Porthos. ‘We’d be up at 5.30, mucking out the horses in the stables. The stunt coordinator Steve Griffin was a sergeant-major figure. He’d remind us we’re not marines, but we are playing people in t he 17th-Century version of the SAS.’ Luke Pasqualino, who plays d’Artagnan, agrees. ‘ Having been beaten to death with a baseball bat in Skins, I ’ m no stranger to challenging scenes, but t he f i ght scenes in Musketeers wer e aanother l evel. The swords are extremely heavy and even though theh edges have been blunted, you could whip someone’s eye oout.’ SiSince t he 1921 silent movie starring Douglas Fairbanks, there have been numerous attempts to translate Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers to the screen. This is the most ambitious effort to date.
‘I wasn’t interested in a straight adaptation,’ says Hodges, whose CV includes the 1999 TV David Copperfield and the series Primeval. ‘I wanted to take the characters and weave entirely new stories around them.
‘I must have seen a dozen versions, all very different. Only Dick Lester’s 1973 version, with Ollie Reed and Racquel Welch, struck the right balance between fun and seriousness. I wanted to create something that looks, feels and even smells authentic.’
Like the novel, it begins in 1625 France wit h y oung nobleman d’Artagnan leaving Gascony for Paris, hoping to become a musketeer of the royal guard. There, he is befriended by Athos, Porthos and Aramis, the most distinguished members of the guard.
‘I looked down and saw my thumb was on theh wrong way round. I shoved it back in place’e’
Filming took place over six months, all on location. An enormous set of Parisian streets, garrison and armoury was built in the Czech town of Doksany.
Capaldi’s costumes, either flowing red robes or reptilian black leather depending on the occasion, were modelled on the famous portraits of Richelieu by Philippe de Champaigne. For the musketeers, costume designer Phoebe de Gaye was anxious to avoid the flouncy plumes-and-feathers look of previous adaptations. ‘Too much of that and you’re looking at a New Romantic video,’ de Gaye laughs.
However, now Capaldi has been installed as the 12th Doctor Who, it has been announced that he won’t be reprising his role in a second series of The Musketeers.
Hodges says: ‘Peter’s been a great asset. The Cardinal is a lot more complex than a panto villain. We were all stunned to hear Peter had landed Doctor Who. He’s a massive asset to The Musketeers. But the show must go on.’
The Musketeers is on BBC1 on Sunday nights