Battle ready
Stars James Norton and Emily Beecham, director Baltasar Kormákur and executive producer Kitty Kaletsky recall their epic effort to bring the Battle of Hastings to television in King & Conqueror – and reveal why there’s more to this historical story than its central protagonists.
During the development of King & Conqueror, James Norton was waiting for his Armageddon moment. In 1998, Armageddon and Deep Impact were released in cinemas within weeks of each other, both imagining gigantic meteorites bound for Earth, with humanity racing against time to prevent destruction.
King & Conqueror tells the story of Harold of Wessex, William of Normandy and the historical events building up to the feted Battle of Hastings in 1066 – and Norton couldn’t believe it had never been dramatised for television. Through planning and then production, he kept looking over his shoulder, anticipating that a rival project might emerge at any moment.
“It was like, how are we the only ones having this idea right now?’” he tells DQ. “We did seem to be the only ones, and we followed it through.”
Approximately seven years in the making, King & Conqueror now debuts on the BBC in the UK after an international coproduction led by Norton and Kitty Kaletsky’s Rabbit Track Pictures was pieced together to make the series. They had first been approached with the idea for the series by writer Michael Robert Johnson, and then built a coalition that included CBS Studios, RVK Studios, The Development Partnership and Shepherd Content.
The BBC became the first major broadcaster to acquire the series and will launch it this Sunday on BBC One, with all eight episodes also available on BBC iPlayer. Paramount Global Content Distribution has shopped the historical drama to networks around the world, including Prime Video in the US, M-Net (Africa), SBS (Australia), Streamz (Belgium), Síminn (Iceland), Sky NZ (New Zealand) and HBO Max across the Nordics, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
While the show’s subject matter might be a staple of the curriculum for British schoolchildren, Norton – who stars and exec produces – says the series isn’t just about that famous date and the battle. It’s also about “the significance of that moment in terms of this country, Europe and the world at large, language, art, politics and legal systems. It’s mad how far-reaching those effects are.”
That’s why it felt like a really important story to tell, and Norton and Kaletsky feel privileged to be the ones to tell it.
“People had tried to tell this story before. There have been various attempts to dramatise the Battle of Hastings, and Mike’s genius was realising not to tell it from William or Harold’s perspective, but actually to honour them both and really focus on their friendship and their relationship,” Norton continues. “What people don’t know is that they had this long friendship and they were brothers in arms. They were allies. Harold fought alongside William in the Breton-Norman war.
“Then one of Kitty’s strokes of genius was realising that it’s not just about these two men. It’s about their partners. It’s about Edith and Matilda, and it’s really about two couples. Once we had that piece of the jigsaw puzzle, we were really off to the races. We were daunted, but once we realised all the ingredients were in place, we knew we had something very special. Then the nerves turned into excitement.”
Described as the story of a clash that defined the future of a country – and a continent – for a thousand years, King & Conqueror charts the fortunes of two interconnected family dynasties, both struggling for power across two countries and a raging sea. Harold of Wessex (Norton) and William of Normandy (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) were two allies who had no ambition for the English throne but found themselves forced by circumstance and personal obsession into a war for possession of the crown.
Playing Harold, Norton found his way into the character through his relationship with his wife Edith (Emily Beecham) and their children. However, he admits that part of the story is “the most created” element, as their relationship – and that of William and Matilda (Clémence Poésy) – was filled out beyond what is in the history books for the screen.
“As Emily says, the women have often been erased from the history books. But of course, they were absolutely central to the story, and it was really exciting, fun and rewarding to work out what their relationships were,” Norton says. “They were clearly very meaningful. Edith was with Harold all the way through to identifying his body after the Battle of Hastings, so there was love there. There was a lifelong relationship.”
Norton also channelled Harold’s pursuit of power – one that shifts from a desire to protect his family and the interests of a nation to one of “self-serving, hubristic ends.” Harold started out in development as a “bit of a brute,” so the challenge to play him was to find more nuance in the character.
“Actually, for me, the real way in was recognising his relationship with his brothers and his father Godwin [Geoff Bell], and him being this middle child between Sweyn [Elliot Cowan] and Tostig [Luther Ford]. It underpinned this dogged pursuit of power, which was partly to do with just a need for affirmation from his father, which is always the thing. Just a little bit of therapy and the world would be a very different place.”
Beecham and Norton have been “acquaintances” for many years, having once worked together on BBC comedy Blandings, and Norton reached out to her to play Edith – though at one point she was also being considered to play Matilda.
“We definitely wanted Emily from the beginning, she was so perfect for Edith,” Norton says. “What we know about Edith for sure is that she was this incredibly beautiful woman, but we needed someone to bring all that complexity and lift it out of the dry history books. Beecham is the one, if you want nuance.”
“James is a very spontaneous and fun actor,” Beecham says. “I always like how he puts a lot of light and shade into his characters and makes it a bit juicy and funny. I thought their relationship could be quite unpredictable and interesting. Then I was sent the scripts. I taped for Clemence’s role, but they said I was more of an Edith.”
Beecham was also attracted to the prospect of bringing a physicality to the relationship between Harold and Edith. “Often, period dramas can be a little bit stiff, and we wanted a real language, all the family dynamics and this constant push and pull between them too,” she says. “It was about bringing those intimate scenes to life, and keeping it charged physically and emotionally between the two of them.”
Quite often in the series, Harold returns home to Edith from a battle, an ambush or a skirmish and can find peace and stability in domesticity.
“There were scenes where Emily would be very physical – there was a scene where she slapped me,” Norton remembers. “It was great, though, because she’s such a brave actress and it became almost like the language Harold knew the best.”
“That was scripted by the way,” Beecham laughs. “I didn’t do that [myself].”
“What she really provides through her relationship with Harold is this moral template and moral centre to him,” Norton adds. “It’s not just about this pursuit of power or violence. It’s about family. It’s about protecting the children. Edith is always reminding Harold of that and bringing him back to this small domestic space.”
Behind the camera is Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (Everest), who helmed episode one and also led the visual style of the series. He was initially sent the pilot script by Norton and fellow EP Kaletsky, and was intrigued by the ambition behind the project. Then as partners were brought in, he found the time he needed to dig into the stories behind the history and of the families, to make it “timely, exciting show about history” beyond the premise of “two white men fighting.”
Kormákur was also instrumental in bringing Coster-Waldau on board as William, having been the first director the production team approached.
“From all of his work, from 101 Reykjavík to Trapped, Baltasar can at once capture the epic and do really grand Hollywood-style scale with the intimate, and he really cares,” Kaletsky says. “Not all directors can do both, but we needed somebody who would be able to capture the epic violence and world-building scale of that period, and we knew we could trust him with it.”
“I like scale,” says the filmmaker, “but the reason I make shows and films is they’re personal. It’s the smaller stuff. I am not a big fan of large-scale battles. You don’t know who’s killing whom. I like to get that feeling of clashes, but I want to be invested inside the story. When people get the money to make those big battles, they tend to forget themselves in the scale of it. Sometimes you’re not invested in the personal aspect of driving a battle.”
With Norton, Coster-Waldau and the rest of the cast largely caked in grime and mud throughout the show, it’s no surprise to hear Kaletsky say the vision for the series “was in the grit and the dirt,” reflecting King & Conqueror’s focus on the characters at the heart of the story.
“The personal story in this particular narrative is the thing that makes it dramatic and entertaining,” she says. “Because we’re making audiences wait eight episodes to get to Hastings, if we haven’t done a good enough job in ensuring that viewers invest in the personal, in the domestic, in the marriages, as well as in the bigger, more territorial factional divisions, then they’re not going to get to the battle anyway.”
Kormákur describes making the series as a “huge undertaking,” from building the “classy” diverse cast from across Europe – Eddie Marsan is Edward the Confessor and Juliet Stevenson is the scheming Lady Emma – to balancing the mud and dirt with “violence and blood.”
But the challenge was “to be both real in some way, but also intriguing,” he says. “A lot of that comes from the people who are creating it and how they see things. It’s not necessarily that it looked like that. I thought it was important that we depict our own vision of that time. That goes into diversity in casting, and also to the emphasis. I was very focused on trying to build the female stories.”
Kormákur wasn’t fazed by telling a story that needed scripts to “connect the dots” between different historical events. “Stories based on real events, you’re always filling in the gaps, even if the people are alive,” he says. “In this case, we were very honest about certain things that we tried to keep as true as possible. The truth is, there are so many different truths.”
“We did a lot of reading, and there is a wealth of literature on the period. There is a ton of primary sources, the Bayeux Tapestry being the most famous one,” Kaletsky notes. “But many of them, arguably, were propaganda. Winners often tell the story.”
In fact, the main use of creative licence in the series may be in its condensed timeline, the exec remarks. “The way people speak to each other, the way they love each other, what happens in the intimate sphere is always going to be up for grabs. As you watch it, you can Google a lot of what happens, the deaths, the battles.”
Kormákur adds: “The reason why, in my opinion, it is remarkably accurate is because there’s so much interesting stuff to take from. If there wasn’t, we would have to create more. That’s our job, to entertain people and keep them interested – in some ways, tell them true stories, but more so keep them engaged.”
Shot entirely on location in Iceland and at Kormákur’s own RVK Studios, filming took place between January and July last year. But rather than shoot in blocks, the difference in daylight during winter and summer on the Nordic island meant the series was filmed entirely out of sequence, with interiors shot on the show’s immersive sets for the first half. Then as the days became brighter, all the exterior location scenes were captured.
“What Iceland has that almost no other country in the world has is hours’ worth of ‘magic hour,’” says Kaletsky. “Cinematographers in the UK, and in places like Australia, I imagine, kill for that 45-minute window when you get to shoot with this exceptional light. And in Iceland, once we were outside, it goes on for hours. You can really see and feel that in the texture of the series. So one of the things I was most nervous about became a huge asset.”
Cocooned together in Iceland for several months during shooting, cast and crew spent their downtime hiking up mountains and around the country’s thermal rivers. “It was amazing,” Beecham says. “Iceland has this little natural, feral quality, and it’s kind of mythic, which is helpful for that period, because we’re just controlled by nature. They had a much stronger relationship to the natural world in that period.”
“There are fewer people in the whole of Iceland there are in York, so it really does feel like you are in the wild. That’s one of the reasons we shot in Iceland, so we get away from all the buildings or the roads,” Norton says. “We all loved being there. It’s a very special place to be and really live for a few months. We didn’t really come home, and we spent the weekends hiking with the crew, learning about Iceland, cold-plunging into the sea.”
That easiness off-set helped to create an organic intimacy once the cameras were rolling. “The more time Emily and I and the rest of the cast spent hanging out, having a really fun and incredibly adventurous time in Iceland, it meant that when we went on camera, it was all there,” Norton adds. “What you see on camera is sort of the wonderful time we were having.”
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tagged in: Baltasar Kormákur, BBC, Clemence Poesy, Emily Beecham, James Norton, King & Conqueror, Kitty Kaletsky, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Paramount Global Content Distribution