
Serpent’s tale
Revolutionary Road screenwriter Justin Haythe discusses his move into television as the showrunner of Samantha Morton-led historical drama The Serpent Queen, why Catherine de Medici is “infinitely interesting” and becoming a director.
Created by Revolutionary Road and Red Sparrow screenwriter Justin Haythe, historical drama The Serpent Queen burst onto screens in 2022 with an unconventional and dramatic retelling of one of France’s most powerful rulers.
Samantha Morton stars as Catherine de Medici, who tells her own story through flashbacks, beginning as a 14-year-old orphan who marries into the 16th century French court. But on her wedding night, she discovers her new husband is in love with Diane de Poitiers (Ludivine Sagnier), a lady-in-waiting twice his age. With her future now uncertain, Catherine quickly learns who she can trust while vowing to survive at any cost.
The Starz series has now returned for a second season, jumping 10 years into the future to a time when Catherine is Queen Regent and her son Charles IX has come of age. As France falls into political and religious turmoil, Catherine struggles to maintain her power in the face of challenges from a mysterious prophet named Edith (Isobel Jesper Jones) and Queen Elizabeth I of England (Minnie Driver).
Based on the book Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France by Leonie Frieda, the series is produced by Lionsgate Television and 3 Arts Entertainment. The season two cast also includes Amrita Acharia, Emma McDonald, Nicholas Burns, Beth Goddard, Raza Jaffrey, Danny Kirrane and Ray Panthaki.
“It’s definitely an escalation,” showrunner Haythe tells DQ about the new season. “But I think people know what to expect from it, and the way things work these days, people who discover it for the first time [now] can come to a show when there’s a season to binge and then they’re interested in a second season. So it’ll be people who really loved it coming back, which is great, and then there’ll be people finding it for the first time.”
Here, Haythe discusses his move into television, the appeal of telling Catherine’s story, how he sought to upend traditional historical dramas and his own move into directing.

With the time jump, did it feel like writing a new series? How did you find the connective tissue between season one and two?
The connective tissue for everything is the character of Catherine, played by Samantha. It’s very much her show. The thing about episodic television is people are coming back [for the next episode] because they like the way they felt last week. But if they feel exactly the way they felt last week, there’s no point in coming back. So the art of it is to revisit what worked about the show, but then also to push it further, to continue to surprise audiences. Audiences are very sophisticated these days. You can take hard right and hard left turns and they’ll follow.
Season one was your first foray into television. How do you reflect on season one and what were the lessons you learned?
I loved doing the first season, partly because you have eight hours to explore these characters. There are a lot of similarities to features and a lot of differences. In a way, it’s an eight-hour movie or a 16-hour movie. It has the same principles of drama, but there’s more room to breathe.
I also loved the first season because I directed episodes. It was the first time I had directed, and it’s something I’ve loved doing. This season I’ve done half the episodes as a director, and I love working with the actors. I’d always been on sets in the feature world and liked that part of it, and was lucky enough to watch great directors do it and absorb some of those lessons.
But in terms of the first season, we did it in extremis. It was right out of Covid, which seems like a distant past now, but it was full of complications. We were one of the only shows shooting in France at the time. Half our actors were in England and couldn’t get into France, and our costumes were in France and couldn’t get into England for fittings. It was crazy trying to be on a set, but we never got properly shut down. In the second season we were free of that. But we had to deal with some strike issues.

What did you originally find interesting about Catherine and her story that meant you wanted to bring it to the screen?
People love royal shows, but it’s not something I had ever thought I wanted to do or was particularly drawn to. But then I read this book about Catherine de Medici. As I was reading, I realised this is a very unique character in the sense that she wasn’t supposed to be a royal. She wasn’t born to it. She’s continually told she’s not attractive. She’s continually told she’s common. Then she goes to France to discover the man she married is, in fact, in love with someone 20 years older than her. She should not have succeeded, and she only succeeded because she’s the smartest person in the room.
I just thought that was a really modern and universal idea. Rather than following the princess, I really liked the idea of following somebody who is a born outsider and therefore was closer to us. That idea coincided with one I’ve had for a while, which is that I wanted to do a villain from history who could plead their case to us. If you could do that and, at the same time, not undermine the really human experience of feeling not pretty enough, not born in the right place, not posh enough and having to survive among people who are constantly going to remind you of that, it was both historic and had scale but was also very relatably human. That’s a unique combination with Catherine.

You also made lots of stylistic choices, such as the first-person narration and Catherine breaking the fourth wall, putting viewers into the story alongside her.
That direct address has been around since the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare, and it’s been done really successfully more recently. But what’s interesting is that it moves to different genres. It works great in Goodfellas, it works great in House of Cards. So it’s a device that’s usable. But in my opinion, if you’re going to use a device that’s been around that long, you have to have a good reason. You have to come at something a little bit different, and this is a world that’s all about presentation, all about masks, because how do you trick someone into believing that God chose you to rule them?
That’s a complicated scam to exercise, and it’s all to do with presentation and surfaces. I liked the idea of someone living in that world constantly playing poker, and just glancing over at us – but not often. My rule was to never undermine the stakes in the scene. But it offers a psychological portrait of Catherine when she’s willing to do it, when she isn’t and when she keeps something to herself.
How have you decided which areas of Catherine’s life to focus on in seasons one and two?
What gives us a licence to skip around time is it’s a story that arguably Catherine is narrating to us. Catherine spent 10 years of her life giving birth to children. That’s not very interesting to watch, so she just jumps over it. These days, you have to be very rigorous with yourself about not extending stories just to extend them. I’ve tried to be very swift and brutal about moving from event to event. That would matter to Catherine.
For me, her life is always broken down into pieces. It was the rise to the throne. It was trying to consolidate power and then being pushed into the event that Catherine is most associated with, which has made her one of the greatest villains in French history. People say she’s responsible for the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre [during the French Wars of Religion in 1572, which led to the deaths of thousands of people]. If I’m right, more people died then than during the French Revolution. There’s real darkness and blood to the story.
Then there’s another chapter about the price she is going to have to pay for what she’s done. That has a lot to do with her children. Those are the stages of life. There’s the ascent; there’s trying to consolidate what you’ve done; and then there’s the reflection of saying, ‘Was it worth what I had to give up to get here?’ So we’ll see how long we go. I would never want to outstay our welcome. But Catherine is infinitely interesting.

What’s the writing process behind the show?
Well, the tone and the voice in this show is very specific. There are all kinds of pitfalls in doing a period show, and it’s interesting because people have a very clear idea about what a period show is, what kind of accent people should have and what kind of dialogue they should use, which I’m a little dismissive of. First of all, there was no unified French language at the time. Maybe there isn’t the ‘Renaissance’ word for a while, but I bet they thought, ‘Wow,’ so I can write ‘Wow.’ I work very closely with Elizabeth Chakkappan and she co-wrote half the scripts this season. It’s a great relationship and we totally understand each other and understand the show. But because of how specific the tone is, I have to have my hands on all of it.
Do you find it comparable to writing for film?
Well, it’s interesting, A lot of the films I’ve worked on, I was on set virtually every day – Revolutionary Road or Bohemian Rhapsody or Red Sparrow. Then there’s other kinds of films that you write, you let the script go and then you see it later. In the sense of watching something come together on the floor, adapting to what’s happening on the floor, adapting to actors and rewriting for actors, that is similar.
What’s different in this one is that I’ve been so lucky to work with some truly brilliant directors captaining the ship, but this time, for better or worse, it is my decisions, my voice and I’m responsible for making the day and for making the budget. So in that sense, a writer’s role is very different in television. They say television is a writer’s medium and film a director’s medium, which isn’t strictly true. Those lines have blurred quite a bit. But in that sense, I’d say that was the chief difference.
How have you found stepping into directing?
I absolutely loved it, and it would be quite hard for me now to write something I really cared about and not direct it myself. I have two wonderful sons who are now 18 and 20, and trying to direct when they were small, you really are gone. It’s not like a writer, who has the best job on set, where you can swan in and swan out and, if it’s a good day, you’re useless. Directing, you’re the first one there and the last one out, aside from the facility guys.
Also, when I write for the screen, I’m directing it in my mind. I’m thinking of shots, thinking of blocking and, in that sense, it was a tool. It was a skill set I realised I’d been practicing for years. And I love working with actors, so it was something I probably always wanted to do but was wary of the time commitment. But this was a scenario where I had already had such control over the scripts that it made a lot of sense to make that transition, and I absolutely loved it. The crew were absolutely brilliant. I loved working in France and I loved working with these people.
tagged in: 3 Arts Entertainment, Justin Haythe, Lionsgate Television, Revolutionary Road, Starz, The Serpent Queen