Yahoo News For Alicia Vikander, 'Firebrand' Wasn't Just a Movie, It Was a History Lesson
“I think I knew the least about Katherine Parr out of all Henry VIII’s wives,” says Alicia Vikander, who plays the sixth and final wife of the infamous king in the new movie Firebrand. It’s understandable, given that the Oscar-winning actress grew up in Sweden, which has its own royal family to worry about. “I'd seen films and TV shows, but the amount that people have read about this in school is quite different; we had other countries we focused on.”
For Vikander, however, it wasn’t too late to learn. “On our first call, Karim [Aïnouz, the film’s Brazilian-born director] was like, ‘OK, we will be the two foreigners coming in here,’ so we knew we had catching up to do, because we wanted to make sure we brought accurate depictions of this period and characters.”
Of course, accuracy is subjective when it comes to history. Firebrand relies on what we know about Parr and her life—she was a writer, religious reformer, and the first English woman to publish a book—and delivers all the period costumes, majestic locations, and Tudor pageantry you’d expect, but also takes bold chances in depicting her relationships with both a mercurial husband in his final years and people deemed subversive by his court.
“There’s a limited amount of information out there—it happened 500 years ago, and while we know a lot about Henry considering his era, it’s still really not all that much,” Vikander says. “Jude [Law, who plays Henry] and I ended up reading quite a few books and sharing sources, but we realized across these different books there are a few pillars that are the same, but the things in between are filled in with an author’s ideas of what happened or didn’t. That rang true to our project and how we were tackling it.”
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The film is faithful to what we know about Parr but fills in the areas between to paint her as a crusader who’s quietly working against her husband’s interest—and, at some very crucial times times, more loudly. It’s a depiction that earned Firebrand a reported eight-minute standing when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and a Hollywood Reporter review that have called it a “richly textured and suspenseful historical” drama that’s “alive with vigorous contemporary attitude.”
That’s precisely what Firebrand is hoping to get across. “Katherine Parr is portrayed normally as this sort of nurse queen, and the reason for making this film is to expand that idea,” Aïnouz says. “She was a good nurse, but she was also an amazing intellectual. When you start researching, it was very hard to find the shortfalls, but what Alicia did was she brought complexity. She was saying, “oh, but she was very privileged,” and she was looking at her sometimes as an arrogant character. She brought all these elements beyond just a profound understanding of what Katherine meant and what she did.”
Firebrand isn’t alone in depicting the Tudors in popular culture. There’s the hit Broadway musical Six—which Vikander hasn’t yet seen—and the upcoming season of The Serpent Queen, on which Minnie Driver will play Queen Elizabeth I (a role inhabited in Firebrand by Junia Rees). What could explain the contemporary ubiquity of the royal clan? “Most historical British dramas reflect more upon a Victorian kind of vibe,” Vikander says, “but the Tudors were more like the rebels. It's grittier, and I think there’s something about the grandeur, how it's bold and big and robust. There’s also obviously something about how brutal Henry was, and why people know more about the women who died than the person who outlived him.”
Beyond just being a lesson about Parr, however, Vikander says that Firebrand can tell us something about humanity—whether that was 500 years ago or today. “We didn't want to shy away from how dangerous and terrifying it needed to tell the story's truth,” she says. “And I don't think that human beings have changed that much in that short amount of time since."
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