When filming an orgy scene at a historic house, one has to take into account the conservation requirements. “One of those stately homes we worked in was a 14th-century building,” says Tony Curran, who plays the 17th-century King James in the racy new seven-part drama Mary & George. “And we couldn’t use any moisture in there. I don’t know how long orgies last – I can’t say I’ve ever been in one – but surely there would be a bit of perspiration somewhat?” But no spray-on sweat was allowed, no fluids at all. A very dry orgy, I suggest. “A very dry orgy!” says Curran with a laugh. “Maybe like certain royals, we don’t sweat.”
Curran has worked steadily and successfully for decades, from challenging films (Andrea Arnold’s debut Red Road) to Marvel universe shows (he was in last year’s Disney+ series Secret Invasion with Olivia Colman). But it’s only relatively recently, in his 50s, that Curran has been given the larger roles he deserves – he was excellent playing a terminally ill man in the 2022 BBC drama Mayflies. “Mary & George has been a real pleasure to be a part of, a real challenge and hopefully people will see it.” He smiles. “And will offer me more work.”
The Mary of the title is Mary Villiers (a typically brilliant Julianne Moore) who, in her beautiful second son George (Nicholas Galitzine), sees everything she needs to advance in life. “If I were a man and I looked like you, I’d rule the fucking planet,” says Mary, before shipping George off to France to learn refinement and set his sights a bit higher than the servant girl he claims to be in love with. Off he goes, a little pathetic, and comes back (thanks to those orgies, perhaps) confident and almost as worldly as his mother. She now trains him on King James (VI of Scotland, I of England), set on getting him into the monarch’s bedchamber. James is, she says, “so cockstruck, it’s like a curse”.
The sex, of which there is an abundance, including a lot of queer Jacobean sex, will grab attention. “Whether or not it was as overt in public as maybe at times we portray it in the show – it’s up to the audience to decide whether they get taken into that world.” And while there is, says Curran, “a sexual rawness to James and George, I don’t think that’s what the show is about”. For George, it’s sex as currency. For James, it’s something else.
“When you can’t find meaning in life, you find distraction – lascivious nature, hedonism, drinking – but I think James wanted to find meaning and distraction. He wanted to get away from court, from the pressures of leadership, of political life.” He remembers getting ready to re-record some dialogue and rewatching a scene in which James and George kiss, and seeing the tenderness. Sexual allure, he says, particularly for George and Mary, is about power, “but then there’s a friendship and ultimately a love, and vulnerability. There are letters from King James to George, and he would [write] ‘my sweet child and wife’.”
The real Mary and George are buried, as is James, at Westminster Abbey – barely 10 minutes’ walk from where Curran and I are talking in a London hotel room – an extraordinary resting place for two people, commoners essentially, who scaled the heights of power. “Mary Villiers has an incredible story – a woman during a time when she had no agency, her husband died and she was left with debts and four children. Her single-mindedness and uncompromising vision was quite incredible.”
Working with Moore, he says, was “inspiring. She was a delight, a lot of fun, very focused.” There were, he points out with a smile, a lot of redheads on set. “The more the merrier.” I ask him how much anti-ginger prejudice he’d experienced in his life. There was bullying at school, he says. Later, when Curran played famous redhead Vincent van Gogh in two 2010 episodes of Doctor Who, someone asked him what, if he could get into a Tardis, would he change about his past. “I said something like, I’d go back to when I was a teenager and say, ‘Don’t give yourself so much of a hard time.’ But as you get older, it rubs off you.”
Curran grew up in Glasgow, where his mother worked for British Telecom and his father was a taxi driver. Theirs wasn’t a family with a history in the performing arts. “My uncle was a redcoat at Butlin’s. I think that’s about as far as it goes,” he says. Curran got involved with youth theatre and had his first role on Scottish TV in a children’s drama, Stookie. He left school at “15 or 16, I wasn’t academic frankly”. Later, he attended the then Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.
In London, where he moved when he was 24, one of Curran’s first mainstream TV roles was as the plumber Lenny in the influential drama This Life. “I remember thinking this was pretty cool.” In the 90s, when Curran played Lenny, who is gay, there wasn’t the same conversation about whether straight actors should play queer roles, but now people will question whether Curran – who is straight – should have been cast as King James. He acknowledges the argument, but believes that for actors to only play what they are, “I feel dilutes what we do as performance artists, because where is the acting? Where are the fundamentals of exploring another human psyche? For me the most important thing is to find out who that person is and try to represent them as truthfully as I possibly can. In that sense, as actors we’re more like chameleons, we’re trying to become anything we can and I think that’s a good thing.”
He was intrigued by James I, because we haven’t, he points out, seen much of him on screen. “He was one of the most compelling characters I’ve ever played,” says Curran. James succeeded Elizabeth I, and a huge amount of history swirls around him – the gunpowder plot, Shakespeare, the witch trials, his translation of the bible, the beginnings of the United Kingdom, and the push into imperialism. When James was a baby, his father, Lord Darnley, was assassinated, and his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned, never to see her son again (she was later executed).
“He used to wear padding in his doublet in case he got stabbed,” says Curran, who spent a lot of time talking to Benjamin Woolley, author of the novel The King’s Assassin on which Mary & George is based. “The term that he came up with was, King James ‘was nourished in fear’. That was something that was helpful to me – his paranoia, and interest in demonology and witchcraft. He’s a compelling figure, and then on top of that was his sexuality.” Why don’t we hear much about him, wonders Curran. “Was it because he was perceived as a weak king?” He didn’t want to wage war on France and Spain. “Was he perceived as a queer king, [so] ‘let’s sweep that aside, we can’t have that’?”
A modern take on the era seemed overdue, and Mary & George feels timely in many ways. Who can hear Mary’s warning about the plight of second sons – “raise yourself, or you will be nothing” – without thinking of a certain red-headed royal? And much can be reassessed through a modern lens: from the place of monarchy in our society – when Elizabeth II took the throne in 1953, a majority of the population believed she had divine right, which would be unthinkable now with Charles’s accession – to the foundation and future of the union.
“When the Acts of Union happened in 1707, that was James’s dream,” says Curran. “He wanted to bring the kingdoms together, to have peace. So it was his fault basically.” Curran, who has lived in LA for the last 20 years, supports Scottish independence. For him, it’s not about the “old enemy” of England, he says. “Because you’re pro this, it doesn’t mean you’re anti that, but I can’t deny that being brought up with the years of Thatcher, in Scotland, was kind of tough. Is it a romantic notion? Or could it work? Does Scotland have the economic power to stand alone? I don’t see why they can’t.” Though James, he adds, probably wouldn’t be happy.
• Mary & George is on Sky Atlantic in the UK and Binge in Australia, and will stream in the US on Starz from 5 April
