VERSAILLES’S Louis XIV
For George Blagden, it’s good to be king.
It is good to be the king,” declares George Blagden, who plays Louis XIV on the Ovation period sudser VERSAILLES, now in its third and final season. “It’s the first role I’ve done that has become more challenging the more I do it. I didn’t really know at the age of 24 what I was taking on with this role — what this role in its entirety encompasses. To represent a historical figure with this level of notoriety, and then represent the man and what he achieved, it has been the most amazing journey. It keeps me on my toes continually.”
Blagden admits that the idea of researching his alter ego was initially mind-boggling. “I was cast about four-and-a-half-weeks before we turned over on season 1, and I was shooting another project at the time,” he recalls. “If the producers had given me a year free with nothing else to do but be on my own in a locked room with all the research available on Louis XIV, I still could not have gotten even halfway through it. So many things that we take for granted in today’s society — luxury and art and fashion — it all happened in this incredible building. So, I had a lot of faith and trust in our fantastic show runners, David [Wolstencroft] and Simon [Mirren], and thank God I did because they really have created a script that is very detailed and sensitive to historical accuracy. David studied this period while he was at Cambridge. We had the chief scientific researcher from the actual Palace of Versailles as our historical consultant. They pieced this story together so I could walk onto that set and do my job, which is to interpret that character in its most human form, and that is the most exciting part for me. He may be an omnipotent king, but what you see on your TV screens is a fragile, mentally unstable boy king who is constantly trying to grow into this man that everyone needed him to be.”
(Louis XIV, VERSAILLES)
Blagden is thrilled that the show has caught on with the Ovation crowd. “When we started shooting the first season, I remember us all, the director of our first three episodes and the writers and our executive producers, we all discussed what we thought the tone of the show was, and everyone had a different opinion,” he says. “That place and that time cannot be put in a box, and I thought that what we would eventually end up making would stick into some sort of genre. We would be able to refer to it as, you know, DOWNTON ABBEY meets GAME OF THRONES, but even now, it’s very unspecific in its genre. But, it has all the right ingredients: love, sex, violence, jealousy, heroics, passion. It’s all there, just with wigs and heels.”
Speaking of which, Bladgen says it takes about two hours for him to transform into the legendary Sun King. “It’s not too bad,” he shrugs of his time spent in the makeup and hair chair. “But four months in, shooting at 5 a.m. and having each individual hair on your mustache adjusted with a pair of fine tweezers is .... No, honestly, I love it because it gives me a couple of hours in the morning to get into character. The result of what you see on-screen of Louis XIV is not just me. It’s the result of 250 people’s hard work in bringing this guy to life. It’s very much his costume and hair and the rooms he inhabits that are very much part of him — as much as what I’m doing. I’m so grateful we get to work with a team like that.”
Though this is one of the most prolific roles of his young career, Blagden notes that
• Currently appearing in the London West End production of Company. • He played cynical revolutionary Grantaire in 2012’s Oscar-winning film adaptation of Les Misérables.
the period garb keeps him from being recognized in public. “It’s quite nice, actually,” he chuckles of the anonymity. “Quite nice. I look very different from my character, and it’s funny because if I’m out and someone is talking about the show, I might get an honest opinion in someone saying what they really think [laughs]. I have thought maybe I should start growing my hair out and just walk down Brick Lane in East London with my heels and see what happens. I don’t know if you’ve ever worn heels, but they do amazing things for your confidence about how you see yourself. It sounds really silly, but just try it. Walk around in a pair of heels for the day. In the evening, you will feel supremely confident.”