Her Royal Hurleyness
First pictures of ‘Queen’ Elizabeth in shocking sex-and-booze movie portrayal of UK royalty
SHE has mingled with royalty many times. But now Elizabeth Hurley is set to raise eyebrows as a champagne-swigging fictional queen in a raunchy new TV series based on Britain’s royal family.
Hurley, 48, stars in The Royals, a new £1million-an-episode TV series produced by America’s giant E! Entertainment channel, best known for its popular reality show, Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Scenes from a trailer for the programme, seen
‘The plot is loosely inspired by Hamlet’
here for the first time, see Hurley’s Queen Helena announcing, ‘In case you’ve forgotten, we are not a normal family’. Characters are also shown dancing provocatively and bed hopping along with the tagline ‘Anarchy in the Monarchy’.
A montage of scenes offers glimpses of The Royals’ lavish lifestyle: a dining room decorated with paintings, polished furniture, and long galleries with stony archways.
The series boasts ‘intrigue, boozing and bisexual cavorting’, according to one insider, who said: ‘They have already filmed a one-hour pilot, which is outrageous. People will see similarities to the real royal family, particularly in the sexy younger prince who tends to walk to the beat of his own drum. Most of the cast are unknown but the producers wanted Liz as the queen to anchor the show.’
The plot, described as ‘loosely inspired by Hamlet’, centres on Prince Liam, whose older brother and heir is killed on military training. Liam – played by William Moseley, Peter in the Chronicles Of Narnia films – falls for the daughter of the head of security, to the fury of Queen
‘I’m just a bitch with money and power ’
Helena, who’s married to Troy actor Vincent Regan’s King Simon. Former Home And Away star Alexandra Park plays Princess Eleanor, who swigs wine from a bottle, saying: ‘I’m just a bitch with money and power but I do make it look good.’
Jeff Olde, E!’s head of programming, said: ‘The Royals offers a fictional look behind the gilded facade of the palace gates to imagine the private, fun, sexy world of the most watched celebrity family on the planet.’
The series will air next year.