The Tudors, especially King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth are a source of endless fascination. With love, lust, marriage, divorce, the crown, the break with the Church, a virgin queen and conquests — carnal and continental, there is a never-ending wealth of material to mine for novels, television and the movies.
Becoming Elizabeth is the latest in a long series of films and shows, which includes Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth movies featuring Cate Blanchett as the Virgin Queen, The Tudors with Jonathan Rhys Meyers playing Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn with Jodie Turner-Smith playing the doomed queen.
Teenaged queen
Like the title suggests, Becoming Elizabeth focusses on an angsty teenage queen skillfully portrayed by Alicia von Rittberg. Speaking from Majorca, the German actor laughingly describes the agony and ecstasy of her costumes.
“It was literally eight layers every day! There was this under-dress and then a four-part at the top and bottom which had to be tied on each side with 12 ties. The team went crazy asking what we were doing for 30 or 40 minutes every morning and between each scene in the trailer.”
The 29-year-old actor said the heavy costumes caused her to move in a completely different way. “You undressed different. You could touch, work and play with every item of the costume. My hair was dyed and not a wig. Nothing was just an ornament. It was all real and cool for us actors because it helped us live in this world, this time.”
Freedom of movement
Shot with natural light and candles, Alicia said it allowed her to move about the set freely. “The cinematographer could just pan with me. Justin Chadwick, the director of the first three episodes, said ‘you should be able to forget everything else and be as free as you want to be.’ Though there were no times off, we could literally lose ourselves in our roles.”
Surely you must be joking!
When she got the invitation to do a self tape as an audition, Alicia thought it was a joke. “I thought it would be absolutely impossible for me to play a British queen because I am German. I did record myself and I got invited for a live audition. I was so nervous. I tried to concentrate on my accent and didn’t remember the lines.”
Despite Alicia’s belief that it was the worst audition she had ever done, she got invited for a screen test. “That is where people showed me that they believed I could manage the accent and play this part. That helped me believe in myself.”
Queen Elizabeth I, Alicia says was the smartest of them all. “She was privileged to be able to learn from her siblings’ mistakes. She did not jump to conclusions or try to fight everyone. She leans back, observes and learns before she makes up her mind. That is her way of surviving.”
From the beginning, Alicia says, Elizabeth had to learn how to survive and choose the right side. “As soon as she realises she is not on the right side, she had to be agile, change her opinion and adapt.”
Deep dive
Having half a year to prepare for her role was helpful, Alicia says. “Whenever I play a historical character, I want to not just read facts, but feel the time. If there are recordings, I love to listen to music of the time. I love to see how people dance, how they act when there are no limits. For Being Elizabeth, since there are no recordings, I watched all the other films that were made about the Elizabethan Age, so I could get a feel of how other great actresses interpreted that time.”
Finding a book with letters and poems that Queen Elizabeth had written, was a big help Alicia says. “It was cool to hear her voice and hear how she wrote a poem or a political letter, how she tried to navigate the political waters she was in. There were some sentences that are eight lines long without a single full stop!”
Practicals too
That was theoretical research Alicia did. “For the practical side, I worked on my British accent with a lot of poetry and prose of the time, including Shakespeare. I learnt horse riding, and was taught how to dance, play the virginal (a stringed musical instrument popular in the Renaissance and Baroque periods) and write calligraphy with a proper quill and tint.”
The process was immersive, and it was useful to live the way Elizabeth must have lived, says Alicia. “She was taught all day and if she wasn’t studying, she was probably outside on a horse. It was helpful to dive into that mindset.”
Alicia admits to loving period pieces. “I love watching them. There is something incredibly powerful and beautiful in learning from history and understanding that the challenges people faced 500 years ago, are not that different from what we face today. If you manage to find a connection between the period piece and now it is special. If it is just dusty, stuck in history, then it might not work.”
The show-runner, Anya Reiss, does not like or watch period dramas, Alicia says. “The producer, George Ormond, told her, ‘why don’t you write a period drama that you would like to watch?’ That is how Becoming Elizabeth became modern. It is not only about the court or religion or politics. It is about the people behind that.”
Becoming Elizabeth is currently streaming on Lionsgate Play
