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Meet Henry VIII, rock star

In a story worthy of the tabloids, Showtime showcases the 16th century monarch.

By Eric Deggans
Published March 31, 2007

Given the recent success of sword-and-sandals epics such as 300 and HBO's Rome, it seems almost a no-brainer to turn the early days of Henry VIII's 16th century court into a sleek, well-produced soap opera. After all, it's a story with intrigue, philandering, death - and a virile, young rock star of a monarch.

So, as Showtime's 10-part series The Tudors hits the small screen Sunday, there's just one question left.

Did any of it really happen this way?

Producer Ben Silverman, who brought us Survivor and Ugly Betty, pitched the idea to TV executives as "Henry VIII as Tony Soprano." He enlisting executive producer-writer Michael Hirst Elizabeth to create a young, athletic Tudor king totally at odds with the beefy, bearded old guy embedded in the popular consciousness.

Married to the wife of his brother, Arthur, when his sibling dies of a fever, Henry VIII bristled at his new wife's struggle to produce a male heir. He railed against the pope for failing to grant a divorce so he could marry his love, Anne Boleyn. It's a heady foundation for The Tudors, which charts the king's evolution from bratty boy king to ruthless monarch. Producers say their version is about 85 percent historically accurate.

"I noticed there was a gap in the (TV) marketplace - there wasn't even a Bonanza-type Western on television anymore," said Silverman, an aggressive dealmaker known for trying to get ahead of the curve. "I knew the young Henry, and I (didn't) want him to be a big fat Orson Welles with a drumstick. I wanted the see the young, virile guy who changed the course of history."

Silverman's star, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, gained his early fame playing a real rock star, Elvis Presley, in a miniseries for CBS. He expects their updated take on the Tudors to snag viewers by presenting Henry as the 16th century's Lindsay Lohan: a spoiled celebrity who expects the world to revolve around his whims.

"We live in a very, very fast world, and Henry's court at the time was the fastest court in the world," said Rhys Meyers, noting that each of the six episodes covers about a year. "(They) say he was the rock star of his time because if you weren't in Henry's court . . . you were nobody. . . . It was the mecca of learning. It was the mecca of style. It was the mecca of fashion. It was the mecca of entertainment. Everything happened around his court."

To answer the historical accuracy question, we watched Sunday's premiere episode with David Carr, a professor specializing in medieval Europe and the Renaissance at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg.

And though it turns out that all the depictions of extramarital sex and jousting may have been true to life, we can be glad Showtime didn't come up with Smell-o-vision for this particular project.

In Henry's day, lords and ladies "weren't really big fans of bathing . . . (and) dental hygiene wasn't big. I'm not sure they smelled as sexy as they look here."

Here's Carr's take on the episode:

On Henry's portrayal as a compulsive womanizer who could hardly tolerate his first wife, Katherine of Aragon: "She was excessively pious - that's probably one of the things that turned him off," said Carr, noting a scene in which Henry has sex with one of the queen's ladies in waiting while Katherine says her evening prayers. "There was always a fair amount of hanky-panky back then. . . . There were any number of individuals who sired children out of wedlock."

On the selection of Rhys Meyers to play Henry: "I would have guessed the real Henry was a little more masculine: a big, imposing kind of guy who got rounder as the years went on," Carr said, adding that Henry didn't turn into the bearded, portly figure of legend until later in life. "It's interesting to look at the suits of armor and see how they got bigger as he put on weight."

On scenes showing Henry in jousting tournaments at a court that resembled a 16th century frat house: "Jousting was actually more common in the 15th and 16th centuries than before," Carr said. "Fundamentally, as feudal armies were becoming worthless, you saw more jousting, where the winner gets the loser's horse and armor and it is all ransomed back for profit."

On the portrayal of Henry's chief adviser, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey - played by Sam Neill (Jurassic Park, A Cry in the Dark) - as a power monger who pined to be pope: "I think, basically, he overreached himself," said Carr. "He was the son of a butcher, by the way . . . (who built) a court that was grander than anything the king had. So Henry took it over."

Eric Deggans can be reached at (727) 893-8521 or deggans@sptimes.com See his blog at blogs.tampabay.com/ media.

The Tudors

Debuts Sunday night at 10 on Showtime. Grade: A. Rating: TV-MA (mature audiences).

[Last modified March 30, 2007, 17:10:08]