Lola helps us Seymour of queen Jane!
Henry VIII’s third wife comes out fighting in the new TV series about her doomed predecessor. Star-in-the-making Lola Petticrew said she gave as good as she got playing Jane Seymour opposite Jodie TurnerSmith’s brilliantly regal Anne Boleyn.
‘She’s Machiavellian, for sure,’ Petticrew said, admiringly.
The 25-year-old actress spent a lot of time discussing with Lynsey Miller, director of the three-part prestige series that starts on Tuesday on Channel 5, how to tackle Seymour who, she said, has ‘always been portrayed as this demure little mouse who doesn’t have a personality’.
‘I thought that would be really boring to watch,’ Petticrew told me. In fact, the show — called simply Anne Boleyn — is anything but boring.
It’s compelling viewing, with Turner-Smith majestic and poignant; and Petticrew sly as a vixen, as she winds Mark Stanley’s ruthless Henry around her little finger and plots against Anne like a silent assassin.
‘People may have underestimated her a bit,’ Belfastborn Petticrew said of her character. Though seemingly an innocent, Jane manages to survive, and thrive, in a court full of intrigue. ‘They’re like a bag of snakes,’ she said of the rival factions all vying for Henry’s favour. ‘They had to be hyper aware that they could be cut — gone! — just like that,’ she said, snapping her fingers for effect.
‘you really had to position yourself, and be aware of what everybody else’s position was, and where you fell in the ranks.’
Petticrew, who was in last year’s sleeper hit Dating Amber with Fionn O’Shea (it’s on Amazon Prime), was speaking to me on Zoom at the end of a long day rehearsing in London for the film Tuesday, which she described as a fairy tale about a mother and daughter. Veep and Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays her mother.
She’s been a busy bee. readers may recognise her as James nesbitt’s daughter in recent tense police procedural Bloodlands. She also appears in the BBC’s powerful mini-series Three Families.
And last year, she filmed Wolf, alongside George MacKay and Lily-rose Depp. It’s set in a clinic for people with lycanthropy — a psychiatric condition where a person believes they can transform into an animal. ‘I’m Parrot,’ Lola told me, matter-of-factly.