Spanish lessons
Kimberley Tell and Joan Amargós, the stars of Spanish period drama Ena: La Reina Victoria Eugenia, discuss this biopic of the British princess who became Queen of Spain, her difficult relationship with her husband and why the series is a “really good history lesson.”
Playing a queen, Kimberley Tell got to wear exquisite costumes and walk the halls of the palaces where real monarchs had lived.
Behind the glamour, however, lay a unique challenge: as the daughter of an English mother and Danish father, born and raised in the Canary Islands, Tell had to master the accent of a British princess who would become Queen of Spain.
Tell plays the title character in Ena: La Reina Victoria Eugenia, a six-part biopic of a young Englishwoman who left behind her home and family and had to renounce her religion to marry Spain’s King Alfonso XIII.
Coming under attack from dissenters on her wedding day, Ena fought for love and acceptance, though never felt either. She became a fashion icon and opened cultural doors for women, from smoking to wearing trousers. Even when she discovered Alfonso’s numerous affairs, she did not give up her role as queen, despite spending increasing time apart from her husband – a distance amplified by the fact Ena was a carrier of hemophilia, a blood condition that led to difficulties securing the line of succession Alfonso desired. Yet her health issues led to her most pivotal role: modernising the Red Cross.
Through her life – the series is set in the early 20th century – Ena bore witness to two world wars, a civil war and the devastating Spanish flu, and the show seeks not just to chart the life of its protagonist but also to dramatise an era that changed a nation.
Tell describes playing Ena in the multilingual series as a “dream role,” having never before played “such an important character.”
“She was an important figure of our history, but one we don’t know much about, because in Spain you see a lot about the civil war, the dictatorship and all that period, but we don’t have much information on the period just before that,” she tells DQ. “In my case, and for a lot of people around me, we didn’t really know much about Ena. You heard about Alfonso XIII, but then once I did the series, I saw that there are a lot of streets and theatres called Victoria Eugenia and I was like, ‘Ah, that’s her.’ So [through the series] you learn a lot about her and about the political situation, and you understand how we got to the point Spain is at now.”
When it came to speaking as Ena, “I had to fake my British accent,” says Tell. “I had to take my Canarian accent, which is a very strong accent in Spain, and put an English accent on top of that.”
Joan Amargós, who plays Alfonso in the series – produced and distributed by RTVE – similarly describes his part as a “huge role.”
“I got the script and I started reading. I thought I knew the story of Spain from the First World War but it was a little bit blurry. I knew the characters. Then I got interested in it and I thought, ‘Wow, it’s amazing.’ It’s amazing in a political way and it’s amazing in a relationship way, because Alfonso XIII goes through Europe looking for somebody to marry,” the actor says. “He’s the king already. He goes around with his mum, [who says] ‘What do you think about this girl?’ He goes through several royal families, and they [Alfonso and Ena] decide to get married.”
In fact, Alfonso was born king, his father Alfonso XII having died while his mother was pregnant with him. “So he’s extremely spoiled,” Amargós says. “You feel it in the way his mum treats him, and how he depends on her. He looks extremely free, in a way, because he does everything he wants. But then you see that he relies on his mum a lot. It was amazing to see their evolution, because everything shines at the beginning. Then the relationship starts to fail. Spain, politically, breaks into little pieces. We lose the colonies. We lose the monarchy. Alfonso finishes in Rome, dying.”
As Alfonso searches for a bride, it emerges that he needs to marry in an attempt to save the monarchy in Spain – but choosing Ena could end up creating even more problems, not least because of his disapproving mother.
“There’s a lot of hope with this marriage,” Amargós says. “There’s a lot of hope because you feel like a huge empire, like the Spanish Empire at that point, if it aligns with the British Empire, it’s a huge moment.”
“Then when they have to marry, she has to renounce her religion,” adds Tell. “She has to become Catholic. But the British king [Edward] didn’t support that. He actually supported it as her uncle, but not as a king. So she lost her nationality; she lost her home.”
Despite the political pressures the couple faced, Tell believes they did fall in love, pointing to the letters they wrote to each other, which she used in her research for the role. “They were like teenagers in love, and I actually think she wanted to marry him because she was in love, and she would never have expected to be queen [of Britain],” she notes of Ena’s position as Queen Victoria’s granddaughter in the line of succession.
From the outside, it looked like a strong partnership. Newspapers even carried a poll “like a teenage magazine” asking readers who should be Alfonso’s girlfriend, with Ena coming out on top. However, by the time they married, “anarchism was growing strongly everywhere, but in Spain especially,” Tell says. “On the day they get married, they suffer a bomb attack under their carriage. People around them die, but they don’t, which I think is like a vision into the future, of what their life is going to be like.
“Everything starts sparkly, they’re in love – and then the family starts breaking down. He has all his affairs, which she accepts. She accepts her role in the family.” And because of her status as a hemophilia carrier, the couple welcome the arrival of just one healthy son. “She has healthy daughters but, of course, you want an eligible son [to be] king, and that breaks their relationship, really. That makes it worse.”
“The main function of a monarchy is to keep on living and have kids so there are more kings. The only thing you have to do hasn’t gone right,” Amargós says.
As she prepared to play Ena, Tell sought out books, letters and other reference material containing information on which she could build her performance. “But of course, you have to just play off your imagination and connect to them in a personal way,” she says.
She also had to develop her partnership with Amargós, as the actors previously knew each other off screen but had never worked together. That involved rehearsals with series director Anaïs Pareto Onghena before shooting began in locations including Madrid and Santander.
“I suppose we just tried to search for things in the rehearsals, like with any other character,” Tell says. “It’s really easy working with him. He’s really funny and we got to shoot a lot [together] at the beginning of the series when they were still in love. But once they started splitting, we started splitting as actors too.”
“The first chapter-and-a-half, we were together all day,” Amargós remembers, “and then we didn’t see each other. It was funny because we are supposed to be together. And we were always saying, ‘Where is the queen?’ or ‘Where is the king?’”
“I talked about him a lot, but I never saw him,” Tell jokes.
Aside from perfecting her accent, the actor found playing Ena “very uncomfortable” owing to the period dresses and corsets she had to wear each day on set. “It was especially hard,” she says. “They were all handmade with real material from that time, so everything was extremely heavy.”
The show’s historical advisor also helped her adopt period-accurate etiquette. “He was always there – ‘Uncross your feet, don’t put your back on the seat.’ And personally, I’m a lot more twitchy when I talk. I talk really fast and I move my hands a lot. I had to force myself to talk slower. But all the movements – the sitting, how I pick up a glass and all that – gives you a character already. [In real life] I would be all over the place. I was like, ‘This isn’t very queen-like.’”
The drama had its world premiere at Mipcom in Cannes in October 2024, before its long-awaited debut in Spain on RTVE’s La 1 towards the end of last year. Tell believes the series is a “really good history lesson” that informs a lot about modern-day Spain – and also represents an interesting subject for international audiences.
“I want it to be seen elsewhere. It’s very international, which is rare for Spanish television,” she says. “It is really special, and it’s very modern as well. It’s a period drama, but even the music mixes electronic music with traditional sounds. It gives it this special atmosphere.”
Amargós adds: “It’s a good series to go international, because it explains a part of Spanish history that a lot of people might not know. Even though everything looked really shiny, we lose the monarchy, it becomes a republic and then it’s a dictatorship, so it’s a huge change in 60 years. It’s really interesting to see why, how, when and where.”
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tagged in: Ena: La Reina Victoria Eugenia, Joan Amargós, Kimberley Tell, La 1, RTVE