God save the Queen!
But there are still years of storytelling between Catherine’s coronation and the demise of her marriage.
Years that see her having a daughter with Henry, suffering through numerous miscarriages, and going to war.
Jason Bell/Starz
And above all, trying to maintain the lie that she was still a virgin when she married Harry.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: As this teaser and these photos show us, Catherine is queen now.
Its all shes ever wanted, but what does that actually mean for her?
Nick Briggs/Starz
It is what she hoped for?
EMMA FROST:At the start, it is everything Catherine hoped for.
She’s the Queen of England.
She’s jointly queen with Henry, the first time that had ever happened.
They were crowned together.
That was an enormous thing for Catherine at the beginning.
She has Henry, who she loves, and they’re riding high.
They’re like rock stars; they’re the center of the universe.
Their court has the best of everything.
It’s rich, and they’re happy, and the arts are flourishing.
But you know, the whole story is based around the lie that Catherine tells in season 1.
So over the course of the second season, that lie that she told will come home to roost.
Last season was really her and Henrys love story, and they were married for 22 years.
How quickly can we expect things to go south?
She’s a great tactician, and her knowledge really helped England.
A lot of it is initially political pressure, mixed with being at court.
Also, to literally to sit in the throne in his absence.
You’ve said we’ll see more of Lina and Oviedo.
Can you tease whats in store for them?
Lina and Oviedo are our moral heart of the show.
Oviedo will rise in the court.
He will be noticed by Henry, and his status improves and increases.
He becomes part of Henry’s inner circle.
They gave us an opportunity to write interesting parallels about immigration and Brexit.
You also said before Meg [Georgie Henley] would return this season.
What kind of role will she and Scotland at large going to play in the season?
GRAHAM:She’s a real big player in this one.
Meg went off in tears to Scotland and met this strapping hunk of Scot and raised children with him.
She raised his illegitimate children [too].
But they got on.
She loves Catherine, but she loves King James.
FROST:Her Achilles heel is her heart.
Will we see any of Maggie Pole?
FROST:She’s absolutely in the show.
And she finds a little romance in an unlikely quarter.
GRAHAM:A frustrated romance.
Maggie will definitely struggle with that, in her relationship with her daughter particularly.
GRAHAM:The journey for Maggie is one of the most exciting aspects of the show.
So lots of British repression is what we should anticipate.
GRAHAM:Nobody does repression like us Brits.
Any new characters we should be excited to meet?
He plays him very beautifully as a gentle, formal man.
She kind of becomes a cause for her brother at the beginning of the show.
Mary is the most wonderful character, played by the very brilliant Sai Bennett.
You really feel a sense of the new generation with those two.
And [them] having very different value systems to their parents and their mothers particularly.
With war and such, it seems like this season might have even bigger set pieces than season 1.
Is that fair to say?
FROST:We have a joust, which we’ve never done in the show before.
They had these gigantic tents, that they were all trying to outshine each other.
There’s more spectacle.
GRAHAM:There’s a wider canvas.
We move around from France to England to Scotland a lot more and tell three interconnected stories.
FROST:But the heart of the show is the emotional and more intimate things.
Has the coronavirus pandemic delayed anything in the process for you?
GRAHAM:Our [postproduction] has not been delayed.
We actually wrapped filming two days before global production shut down.
Charlotte was very under the weather and asked if we needed to delay the last day.
I want to finish it."
We would never have been able to shoot it.
So we actually did wrap.
All our editors are cutting at home.
All of the effects people are working at home.
Our orchestra are recording their instrumentation basically individually from their homes.
We are still marching ahead, and we are on time to deliver when we said we would.
