If anyone can grab the story of Richard III by the doublet and shake him out of the controversy surrounding his skeleton found buried under a car park, it is comedy actor Steve Coogan.
In a rousing interpretation of the facts, Coogan beats down the doors of the establishment and drags the story into the light of the cinema screen for The Lost King report the Express.
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After the success of his 2013 Venice entry Philomena, Coogan has found himself reunited with that film’s creative team - director Stephen Frears and writer Jeff Pope - for another bittersweet comedy based on real-life events.
“If this wasn’t a true story,” Pope said, “we’d have been laughed out of town: a housewife from Edinburgh, a mother of two, decides she wants to find a 500-year-old lost king and then uncovers him underneath the car park in Leicester. As a pitch, that sounds ridiculous. But it’s all true.”
The idea came to Coogan after watching a Channel 4 documentary called The King in the Car Park, about a woman named Philippa Langley - played by Sally Hawkins in the film - who became fascinated with the story of Richard III and sponsored an archaeological dig to find the remains of the 15th century monarch killed in battle.
Said Coogan: “I got in touch with Philippa because she seemed to be the driving force behind this quest. The fact that she wasn’t part of a big institution, that she was just, for want of a better term, an amateur historian, that in itself fascinated me.”
Starring Hawkins and Coogan, the film was shot entirely on location in Edinburgh over two months in 2021. The script - “based on real events...mostly,” we are told - smartly allows moviegoers to discover along with Hawkins just how influential this dedicated woman, President of the Scottish branch of the Richard III Society, actually is in making the historic discovery.
Co-writer and producer Steve Coogan plays Langley’s supportive ex-partner John, and Harry Lloyd plays the ghostly vision of the king who appears comfortingly to Langley in full regalia and crown.
“It’s a David and Goliath story,” he said. “It’s about the amateur versus the establishment.”
Exactly how accurate this is appears to be up for debate: the academics concerned have recently said they were actually supportive and are being turned into bad guys for the sake of the film.
Mark Addy plays Dr Richard Buckley, the real-life Leicester archaeologist in charge of the historic dig who helps Langley at first but then arguably seems to let her down a bit by not doing enough to acknowledge her central importance to the project.
The closing credits reveal that Langley got the MBE for her work - but not that Buckley got the superior OBE. In cinemas October 7.
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