US DVD release of Season 2 December 30th
September 28, 2008, 2:52 pm
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The US release of Season 2 of The Tudors is to be on December 30th ‘08.
The complete boxed set is available to Pre Order from Amazon.com priced at $25.99
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Showtime Orders A Third Season Of The Tudors
April 22, 2008, 10:14 pm
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| Tuesday, April 22, 2008 | |
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As episode six of THE TUDORS’ second season debuts this coming Sunday on SHOWTIME, the network is ramping up for a third season of palace intrigue and royal drama, premiering in 2009. Production is slated to begin on June 16th in Dublin, Ireland with series star Jonathan Rhys Meyers set to return.
THE TUDORS took SHOWTIME subscribers and the media by storm when it premiered in April 2006, generating record viewership and critical acclaim. Last year, both the series and Rhys Meyers earned Golden Globe® nominations. And, season one of THE TUDORS is currently one of CBS Home Entertainment’s top-selling titles. “THE TUDORS is now a fixture for us at SHOWTIME and we’re on our way to completing the entire saga of all six wives of Henry VIII,” says SHOWTIME President of Entertainment Robert Greenblatt. “We are enormously proud of this show, the extraordinary cast, and the production team that recreates the grandeur of the Renaissance year in and year out. There is nothing like this anywhere on American television.” Viewers and critics alike have been enthralled watching the storied exploits of the sexy, hard-bodied King Henry VIII (Rhys Meyers) as he weds Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer) while working to declare his marriage invalid to Queen Katherine (Maria Doyle Kennedy). This prompts Pope Paul III (Peter O’Toole) to have him excommunicated — a fall-out that changed the course of history. Anne’s failure to deliver a male heir sets the wheels in motion for her beheading, and sends Henry straight into the arms of yet another prospect – Jane Seymour (Anita Briem), who dies from an infection after finally giving him his coveted male heir. |
Showtime increases ‘Tudors’ reach
March 31, 2008, 1:55 pm
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NEW YORK, March 28 (UPI) — Showtime has set up a multi-platform campaign to promote the second season of its acclaimed series “The Tudors,” the U.S. cable television network said.
The first episode of the second season of the sexy historical drama starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Natalie Dormer and Peter O’Toole will air on Showtime Sunday.
It will also be available through the CBS Audience Network and on such Web sites as Yahoo, Amazon Unbox, NetFlix, MSN, TV.com, TVGuide.com, YouTube, Veoh, Gather.com, blogs and on iTunes via podcast, Showtime said.
The episode will be available via mobile phones to subscribers of Verizon Wireless on the V CAST platform, as well, and Showtime subscribers can also watch it on their affiliate Web sites such as Comcast.net, DirecTV.com and Charter.net.
“The strategy to release a full episode on digital platforms has proven to be a very effective tool for Showtime, not only increasing consumers’ exposure to premium television programs, but also to help drive subscription to the network,” Robert Hayes, senior vice president of the Showtime Digital Group, said in a statement. “This is our most ambitious multi-platform push yet to subscribers and non-subscribers and we expect to have a combined reach of over 190 million users.”
DIANA’S LOVE TRIANGLE LINE REVAMPED FOR THE TUDORS
March 29, 2008, 9:36 pm
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One of PRINCESS DIANA’s
most famous lines is to feature in the upcoming second season of TV hit THE TUDORS after producer MICHAEL HIRST insisted on putting it in the mouth of HENRY VIII’s mistress-turned-second wife ANNE BOLEYN. Hirst was so excited when he realised Henry’s love triangle with Boleyn and his first wife Catherine of Aragon mirrored that of Prince Charles, Diana and Camilla Parker-Bowles, he insisted on making subtle links. And when Boleyn scolds Henry, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, raging, “You can’t have three people in a marriage,” Hirst admits the words are lifted straight from Diana. He tells the Los Angeles Times newspaper, “I was very naughty. I had Anne Boleyn say it because it was an extraordinarily similar situation. “I like the fact that I can put in these contemporary references, just to point out that things don’t change that much.” The second season of the hit period drama debuts on Sunday (30Mar08) in America.
Second Season Bow Marks First Time Net Has Aired Entire Episode On Popular Site
March 27, 2008, 3:21 am
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Showtime is using new media to showcase its historical re-telling of the Henry VIII tale. The pay TV channel will stream the premiere second season episode of its drama The Tudors tomorrow March 27 on YouTube, three days prior to the show’s March 30 debut on Showtime.
Showtime will air an edited, TV-MA version of the series on YouTube, marking the first time a cable network has aired a original series episode in its entirety on the popular social networking site.
YouTube joins some 60 other online partners including Yahoo and MSN, as well as cable operators Comcast and Charter in offering a preview of the episode in advance of Showtime’s linear premiere, Sunday at 10 p.m.. according to network executives.
Liz Smith: Catching up with Jonathan Rhys Meyers as he starts new season of ‘Tudors’
March 27, 2008, 3:13 am
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It’s good to be Jonathan Rhys Meyers. This young actor – only 30, though acting since his teens – has hit his stride. He plays a new kind of Henry VIII in Showtime’s opulent and sexy The Tudors.
I met with Jonathan down in Manhattan’s Soho, at the trendy 60 Thompson Street hotel. It was a chilly, rainy day, but Jonathan appeared wearing a tight, white T-shirt, cut to a deep clavicle-baring vee, a snug sweater over it – one button fastened to emphasize his small waist – and well-fitted jeans. He looked, head to toe, like a page from men’s Vogue. He is impossibly handsome. His features are startlingly lush, the eyes, the famous mouth. Even if Jonathan weren’t a famous actor, he’d stop any room he entered.
The star is kinetic, and at first, almost disconcertingly intense. He laughs, “Oh, I know it. People always say to me, you’re so jittery, you can’t sit still, you’re nervous. But I’m not nervous. I’m just a very excitable guy. I’m enthusiastic. I can’t help myself.”
He says that when he made Mission Impossible III with Tom Cruise, he found somebody else with a similar powerful energy. “I had a great time on that, and when Tom and I were together it was like, whoosh, all the air in the room evaporated. “I remind Jonathan that we’d met briefly once before, at the premiere of his Woody Allen thriller, Match Point. I hadn’t been able to talk at length with him that night. But, when I passed him at the party, I said, “Great film, great performance, but what a sociopath your character is.” Jonathan stepped back and barked, “He’s not a sociopath; he’s just a guy in a bad spot.”
So now I ask, was Henry VIII a sociopath or “just a guy in a bad spot?” Jonathan says: “Neither. He’s a megalomaniac, somebody with absolute power who has been corrupted by it, absolutely.
“He was a great king in many ways, and did great things. But he also did terrible things. Not just to his women, but to his people. In the matter of divorcing Catherine of Aragon and marrying Anne Boleyn, challenging the church, he gave his people no choice. Choose the pope or the king, be excommunicated by the pope or excommunicated by the king. And God help you if you choose the pope!”
“I’m trying to show how he became what he became, why he was so paranoid, why he was so ashamed. He was paranoid because everybody wanted to be king and the knives were everywhere, literally. He was ashamed because in the matter of Catherine and Anne, he knew he’d done wrong. He never doubted the legitimacy of his marriage to Catherine. He wanted Anne, period.”
The second season of The Tudors debuts on Showtime Sunday. And the network is already planning a third season, minus the unfortunate ladies, Anne and Catherine, who meet their respective ends this year. Jonathan says, “I hope Season 3 focuses on the rebellion in Scotland, where you see Henry fight for a change.”
On the big screen, Jonathan will soon be seen in The Children of Huang Shi, in which he plays a reporter covering the infamous Japanese occupation of China in 1937.
But Henry VIII fascinates Jonathan – it is a performance in progress. “I base a lot of what I do with Henry on Sir Thomas More’s remark, “We must never let the lion know his own strength. God help us if we do!”
Season 3 of the Tudors is in the future…
March 27, 2008, 3:06 am
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Micheal Hirst is working on scripts and making plans to begin filming a third season of The Tudors in Ireland in early June, which will cover 1536-40, the death of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, and the Pilgrimage of Grace. Showtime is expected to issue the formal go-ahead next month.
Portraying Henry
In “The Other Boleyn Girl,” Eric Bana as Henry VIII gets involved with Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn, sister of the ill-fated Anne Boleyn.
The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). Laughton won an Oscar for the role, but virile doesn’t necessary come to mind when looking at the chubby actor, hardly a pinup. In fact, according to The Wall Street Journal, Netflix customers have called Laughton “the 1930s Jack Black.”
A Man for All Seasons (1966). Shaw received an Academy Award nomination for his vengeful, lusty megalomaniac in the flick which won the year’s best-picture Oscar.
Anne of the Thousand Days (1969). Film critic Pauline Kael wasn’t impressed with Burton’s Oscar-nominated portrait of a burly, randy and rambunctious man-child. She said “Burton’s Henry is conceived as a weak, tentative, somewhat apologetic monarch.”
The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970). The Australian actor has been called the definitive Henry VIII. In this classic British TV miniseries, he plays Henry from his hot, Renaissance-man youth, through his latter-day intellectual frustrations and sexual mania and, eventual, illness-ridden death.
The Tudors (2007). In the Showtime TV series, with new episodes starting this month, the 30-year-old Irish actor’s brooding attitude, bedroom eyes and bulging muscles — he’s thinner and more fit than previous Henrys — have made him one comely king.
The Other Boleyn Girl (2008). The Aussie actor adds his own smoldering va-va-voom. According to Entertainment Weekly, Bana “is courtlier, less infantile, than the Henrys we’re used to, until he gets to the bedroom, where he treats women like legs of mutton as tasty treats to be devoured.” Columbia Pictures
March 7, 2008, 7:47 pm
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Is it really good to be the king?
If you have the stomach for it.
And, of course, in later life, Henry VIII had that – stomach, I mean — something like 300 pounds worth.
Figuratively, he had it much earlier, when he took over the English throne in 1509 at 18, soon after his father, Henry VII, died.
Henry VIII killed a wife who couldn’t produce male heirs, tortured and killed alleged and real adulterers, and was himself an adulterer at will — and he had a lot of will.
The drama of Henry VIII and his six wives — and twice as many mistresses — has been fodder for plays, movies and popular culture for centuries, from way back to William Shakespeare’s own play, “Henry VIII” — written nearly a century after Henry reigned — to Showtime’s series “The Tudors.”
The reason is simple: It’s a soap opera with cool costumes, funky accents, political intrigue and lots of sex.
The movie of Philippa Gregory’s sexy historical novel, “The Other Boleyn Girl,” which opened Feb. 29, stars an extremely virile Eric Bana as the Tudor king obsessed with making sure his DNA lives to rule another day.
The Showtime series, whose new season begins at 9 p.m. March 30, stars an as-cool-looking Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
How realistic is this pop-culture depiction of a young, strapping Henry, ready for love?
Realistic enough, said a local professor.
“When he’s young, he’s dashing, and tall for his age [6 feet 1 inch],” said John Patrick Montaño, associate professor of history at the University of Delaware.
“He’s 18 when he comes to power, and the other kings of Europe are older. He hunts, dances, plays music. He’s a classic early Renaissance man.”
“Renaissance man” is the appellation we give to people who do a lot of different things very well, and are very cool about it. Like Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare. Nice company to be in.
Certainly, for dramatic purposes, Bana’s and Meyers’ well-defined pecs aren’t absurdly anachronistic.
Henry turned into a 300-pound behemoth that resembled the sensual slob that Charles Laughton portrayed — with leg of lamb in hand — in his Oscar-winning turn in 1933.
But, as a young man, Henry VIII was as hungry and lusty as much of the rest of us.
A normal man can’t help but be flattered — and turned on — by women fawning all over him, no matter their motives. What made it even better (for Henry, not the ladies) was his political goal: reproduction.
Sallow-cheeked and a bit droopy-eyed, yes, if you trust a 1509 portrait of the young Henry from the Denver Art Museum’s Berger Collection.
Wide-faced, sure, but imposing and magisterial, if you take painter Hans Holbein’s famous 1537 portrait of the maturing king seriously.
But consider Bana’s looks a dramatic metaphor, or meditation, on the allure of power.
Good looks really don’t have all that much to do with kingly success in the field of getting chicks.
In merry olde England, “He is the fount of all patronage, grants, money and land,” Montaño said.
Which is one of the reasons why there are two Boleyns that mattered in Henry’s life.
“Boleyn’s father pushed both of them on the court,” Montaño said. “He knows that Henry has his eye on the ladies.”
Yes, that would make Mr. Boleyn something of a pimp.
But not really. Consider the times, Montaño said.
If Europe in the 16th century was anything, it was an age of men. Girls didn’t matter — except to give birth to more men, to keep the family name and line going.
This is terribly important in a society that ostensibly believes not only in a monarchy, but one that is sanctioned by the biggest monarch of them all, God.
Henry’s father had just ended the War of the Roses, which had plunged England in a decades-long civil war. The last thing the boy-king wanted was any doubt that his line — and the continued peace of his country — would continue unbroken.
From a young, virile, heterosexual point of view, it was really good to be king in 1509.
But the Tudors had a problem producing healthy children that were male.
Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, failed to produce a boy. Instead, she produced the future queen who came to be known as Bloody Mary. Yuck.
Henry had to get a papal dispensation to marry Catherine, who already had been married by proxy to Henry’s older brother, Arthur, who died young.
But, after more than 15 years, Henry grew impatient with Catherine’s inability to produce a boy.
Mary Boleyn, the “other” one in Gregory’s title, had by then become Henry’s mistress. But any fruit of that relationship would have been illegitimate. He may have had a great time with Mary, but it didn’t count.
Another Boleyn, Anne, paraded herself in front of Henry, and, smarty-pants that she was, refused to become his mistress. She held out for marriage.
Which, of course, made Henry — and every guy before or after him — want her even more.
So, Henry tried to get his marriage to Catherine annulled to marry Anne, who told him that she would deliver him lots of boys.
This time, the pope said no, because he was busy kissing up to the Holy Roman Emperor, who, to put it mildly, didn’t like Henry.
So, there it is — the beginning of Henry VIII’s and England’s break from Rome and their mild version of the Protestant Reformation.
Alas for Anne, she wasn’t any luckier in having a boy who lived than Catherine was.
She did, however, give birth to Elizabeth, who eventually went on to reign from 1558 to 1603.
But this could only have been posthumous cold comfort to Anne, who lost her head because Henry grew as impatient with her as he had with Catherine.
And now, being head of his own church, he could do what he wanted.
“Anne gets beheaded after he accuses her of adultery with her first boyfriend, whom he tortured until he confessed,” Montaño said. “He also accused her of having unnatural relations with one of her brothers.”
Call it overkill.
The day after Anne died, Henry got engaged to Jane Seymour.
But we’re going to stop there. Even though there’s more blood and sex and adultery to follow, there’s not enough space here to follow it.
See? This is why dramatizations, plays, novels, movies and TV shows continue to tell the tale. So, enjoy.
But realize they’re all fictionalized versions of at least two essential truths that we tend to forget because we like to watch people figure out how to have sex.
One truth is that it was good to be the king in the 16th century.
The other is that getting chicks has little to do with looks and, even, alas, love.
It’s about power, position, a dash of talent, and convincing the lady in question that you’re the best thing that could happen to her.
Times don’t change.
Eighth of that name, he died in 1547, yet this passionate king’s allure lives The News Journal
Artist Hans Holbein’s famous portrait of His Majesty from about 1537 is the “only definitive portrait” according to the Tate Britain, which featured the painting from Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum during a 2006-2007 exhibition. The portrait is the only image of the king known to be just one step removed from a drawing done by Holbein from life. Henry, about 46, is portly, intimidating, self-confident and wary.
On This Date
In 1540, England’s King Henry VIII married his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. (The marriage lasted about six months.)
The Tudors Returns March 30th
Here is the poster for season two of Showtime’s The Tudors, Jonathan Rhys Meyers returns as bad boy King Henry VIII and Henry Cavill as Henry VIII’s best friend, Charles Brandon.Season 2 of The Tudors kicks off on Sunday, March 30th. The premiere begins with Henry and Catherine still not quite divorced, and the nation in upheaval. Multiple Oscar nominee Peter O’Toole, 74, recently joined the cast as Pope Paul III.
