Magicians make history in BBC drama
The new series has more in common with ‘Star Wars’ than ‘Harry Potter’
The magic men of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell are coming to put a spell on American TV viewers, with no wands or Quidditch brooms in sight.
Premiering Saturday on BBC America (10 p.m. ET/PT), the seven-hour British drama, based on the Susanna Clarke novel, is influenced more by Charles Dickens than J.K. Rowling with its story of two magicians who couldn’t be more different in an alternate version of English history.
In the early 1800s during the Napoleonic Wars, repressed Scrooge-y curmudgeon Gilbert Norrell (Eddie Marsan) brings magic back in a big way, making statues at York Minster come alive before arriving in London to offer his services to the war effort. When no one takes him seriously, he makes a deal with a mysterious faerie known as The Gentleman (Marc Warren) to save the life of a politician’s fiancée (Alice Englert) and unleashes a dangerous power.
Meanwhile, in Shropshire, Jonathan Strange (Bertie Carvel) is a flamboyant fop for whom no one has very high expectations — including his love, Arabella (Charlotte Riley). But a run-in with a street performer sends him on his way to meet Norrell and have a grand adventure that takes the viewers from the front- lines of the Peninsular War to Venice to a fantasy kingdom.
“I’m worried that Americans may think that the Battle of Waterloo was won through magic, which it wasn’t,” jokes producer Nick Hirschkorn.
From the English countryside to conjuring sand horses along a beach, Strange’s story arc has echoes of Star Wars: “He’s like a young Luke Skywalker who ends up being an apprentice and goes to war and comes back a changed man and becomes a warlock, effectively,” Hirschkorn says.
Carvel says Strange “grows up over and over again, and he has to go through way more and deeper life changes than I think he would expect when you first meet him.”
While Strange is fueled by instinct, Norrell is powered by reason and analysis. He also goes through “an incredible transformation” after starting off neurotic and obsessed, Marsan says. “It’s very interesting playing a character who has all the information, all the power, but is still scared.”
Marsan adds that there are shades of Breaking Bad’s Walter White in Norrell, but primarily he thought of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his work on the atomic bomb.
“When Gilbert Norrell brings magic to the Napoleonic Wars, there are terrible consequences,” he says. “Strange just explores it and is curious and arrogant, but Norrell knows how dangerous it is but still does it.”
Strange and Norrell don’t interact much through the course of the series — the first time they meet is in the second episode, and it doesn’t go that well.
“Whenever they do get together, we tried to make it really special,” says writer Peter Harness, adding that there’s a rivalry but also “partially a bromance and partly a father/son relationship.”
As the series opens, Norrell is trying to put the study of magic in line with the other aspects of the Age of Enlightenment, and it’s as much of an everyday, credible part of life in Strange as science or politics.
The series isn’t short on magical spectacle — in addition to the living York Minster statues, there’s a ghost fleet of ships that spook the French — but viewers will have to wait for the big set pieces.
“We couldn’t just sex up the first episode to pander to our audience,” says director Toby Haynes. “We wanted to make sure that the magic didn’t feel overused or easy. It was something that you had to earn. Like anything good in life, it comes at a cost.”
But the Strange sorcery isn’t Harry Potter stuff, Marsan warns. “It’s a frightening magic,” he says. “It’s the kind of magic that could steal your child away in the middle of the night (and) the kind of magic that could burn you alive.”