Tall Tudor tale
The Tudors might be an evergreen subject for historical dramas, but in the hands of My Lady Jane showrunners Gemma Burgess and Meredith Glynn, history is almost unrecognisable. They outline how they created this dramatic alt-history series that imagines a different future for Lady Jane Grey.
When it comes to dramas based on British royal history, the Tudor period – best known for King Henry VIII and his six wives – is the era that keeps on giving.
Earlier this year, Disney+ launched murder mystery Shardlake, while the long-awaited sequel to Wolf Hall – Wolf Hall: The Mirror & The Light – is finally on the horizon. The Tudors also leant their name to the title of an HBO series, Becoming Elizabeth explored the titular monarch’s formative years, The Spanish Princess followed Catherine of Aragon’s journey from Spain to become Henry’s first wife, and Anne Boleyn took the perspective of Henry’s doomed second wife.
“I think about this a lot, and I sometimes wonder if it’s because it’s one of the earliest periods in British history from which we have an awful lot of material from the time,” suggests Gemma Burgess. “It also just feels so full of passion and real people. Every time you open a book, you’re like, ‘Wait, Robert Dudley’s wife was maybe pushed down the stairs and Elizabeth was behind it.’ There are just so many stories. We’re almost spoilt for stories to pick up and put down.”
“And it was a time when these powerful institutions were being challenged,” notes Meredith Glynn. “Women were getting power. There was a Protestant Reformation happening. The old ways were dying and the new ways were being born. We always are drawn to those periods of extreme transformation.”
In the hands of Burgess and Glynn, Tudor history has certainly undergone an extreme transformation. They are co-showrunners of My Lady Jane, a Prime Video series that applies a fantastical, romantic and alternative twist to the life of Lady Jane Grey, who ruled England for just nine days before she was deposed and later executed in 1553.
In this radical retelling, the damsel in distress saves herself in a universe where King Henry VIII’s son Edward does not die of tuberculosis, Lady Jane is not beheaded and neither is her scoundrel husband Guildford. Instead, the brilliant and headstrong Jane is shocked to become queen and finds herself the target of nefarious villains coming for the crown.
Newcomer Emily Bader stars as Jane, with Edward Bluemel (Killing Eve) as Guildford Dudley. Jordan Peters (Pirates) plays King Edward, Dominic Cooper (Preacher) is Lord Seymour, Anna Chancellor (Pennyworth) plays Jane’s mother, Lady Frances Grey, and Rob Brydon (The Trip) plays Lord Dudley, Guildford’s father. Jim Broadbent (The Duke) also appears as the Duke of Leicester, Jane’s uncle.
“Everyone knows Lady Jane Grey was a Tudor queen, and she was queen for nine days and then tragically beheaded,” Burgess tells DQ. “She was an intellectual, and she was given an unfair shake by history, let’s say.
“Since then, she’s become very famous as the sort of ultimate eroticised figure of doomed female helplessness,” Flynn continues. “We were both fairly dramatic teenagers, and we were very obsessed with the Helena Bonham Carter movie [1986’s Lady Jane] and Cary Elwes, and the Delaroche painting [1833’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey].
“It’s completely anachronistic; there are no paintings of Jane from the actual time. But it’s so romantic and so helpless, and we just sort of thought, ‘Fuck that.’ When I was on the subway in New York, I saw a girl reading a book about one inch from her face, and I’m a busybody so I wrote the name down and bought it, and read it right away. I remember holding it against my chest and thinking, ‘This is the story that Jane Grey should have had, and I want to make it into a television show.’”
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That book was My Lady Jane, by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows, and Glynn has achieved her ambition to turn it into a TV series – one that breaks most historical drama screenwriting rules along the way. The show opens with an animated sequence that portrays the real history from which the series soon departs, while there is also narration, characters breaking the fourth wall and fantastical elements brought to life by visual effects, all to the tune of a punk rock soundtrack.
“All of the characters are very real to us, which means that even when more fantastical things happen, it feels real. It’s not a world of magic and witches and spells,” Burgess says. “There are lots of shows that tell the real history very well. We’ve got a Wolf Hall, you’ve got Becoming Elizabeth. There are incredible, romantic corset dramas that everyone’s obsessed with, and these fantastic fantasy shows. We did not want to be like everybody else. We just wanted to do our own thing.”
That’s not to say My Lady Jane doesn’t embrace the period in which it is set; it merely plays with what might be expected from a Tudor series. One example is the decision to dispense with women’s hats.
“They’re not great. They’re not great for lighting. They’re not great for make-up. We just didn’t do them,” Burgess says. “So a lot of the time we were just making the choice that felt right for us, based entirely on the creative group.”
“Superficially, who doesn’t love Tudor world porn, right? The castles, the costumes, the jewels,” says Glynn. “We are not immune to the charms of these things. We throw ourselves at them, we love them. But we also wanted to stay truthful to lots of aspects of the period. We had consultants who helped us do that, but we also wanted to have fun with just how alien and weird the Tudor era could be – what they were eating, what they considered medicine.”
Three historical consultants – Ruth Goodman, Suzannah Lipscomb and Dr Joanne Paul – were also on hand to cast their eyes over the scripts. Burgess remembers: “They would read them and say, ‘You know that no one says ‘As if,’’ and we were like, ‘Yeah, that’s cool.’ But then they also had a great sense of humour and came at it with more ideas, and their ideas ended up in the script. So it was really collaborative.”
Were there limits to how far they wanted to push history? “We didn’t actually draw and quarter anyone, but we talked about it,” Glynn jokes.
“There were certain things we didn’t do,” Burgess adds. “For example, all the Tudors had rushes on the floor with lavender and things to make things smell good. It’s awfully hard to film in that. That makes a lot of noise. It makes a lot of dust. So we just didn’t do it. It’s visually stunning, but very hard to film in.”
Burgess and Glynn first met when Prime Video opened a writers room for the project based on the first two scripts written by Burgess. Glynn was on hiatus from working on another Prime Video series, The Boys, and was looking something to do between seasons. She then read Burgess’s work, “and it seduced me from the page,” she says. “The world she created and the characters were so vivid, and it was a sandbox I desperately wanted to build castles in myself, and I feel so fortunate that she has let me and that we’ve been able to co-create this great show.”
“We both really wanted to make television shows and be showrunners, not be screenwriters sitting at home in the corner of the bedroom, which I’ve done and Meredith has done,” Glynn says. “We wanted to make something, to have our worldview shape the show. And we love working together.”
They both wanted to make a series that was “swashbuckling, romantic, feminist, rebellious and very funny,” and they found it in My Lady Jane, in which the brilliant and ambitious title character seeks independence and power – and then gets power and a whole new set of problems.
As co-showrunners, “we got professionally married and fell in deep professional love,” Glynn says. The pair became fast friends and trusted each other’s instincts on how to take the show forward, as they might often be working on different parts of the show on different days, or be on different locations during production.
“The main thing is we keep very nimble and we communicate a thousand times a day,” says Burgess. However, the pair didn’t actually meet in person for a year after starting work together, owing to the fact Glynn is based in LA and British writer Burgess was in New York.
“We ran the season one room on Zoom. So we finally met in London in April 2022 to start doing location scouts – and we were both so overwhelmed to see each other, we had to have a bottle of champagne. We were exceptionally fortunate to find each other.”
Throughout the writing process, Jane remained the project’s “north star,” with every storyline or action returning to the show’s heroine. Some of the showrunners’ inspirations also included other alt-history series and movies such as The Man in the High Castle, Inglourious Basterds, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Great, while parts of the VFX work for the show’s fantastical elements were informed by Willow, Labyrinth and the Delorean from Back to the Future.
Filming took place on location in numerous historic houses and grounds in the UK, such as Great Chalfield Manor, Broughton Castle, Hampton Court Palace and Dorney Court, while the production was based in Harlesden, North London.
During filming, they butted up against the stubborn British weather – “If someone says to you, let’s do a night shoot in Dover at the castle in November, don’t do it. Just don’t do it,” Burgess says – but My Lady Jane had the fortune to wrap before the US actors and writers strikes began last summer.
Then in post-production, every decision was funnelled back through the showrunners. “We know exactly what’s right when we see it. We know what’s wrong when we see it. It’s kind of like making a sandwich. You know what you want to eat,” Burgess says. “We knew what we wanted to eat.”
“We always wanted the jeopardy to be real,” Glynn explains. “We wanted the emotion to be real. We wanted to make sure the characters and what they were experiencing was the grounding principle of every episode. And if you do that and the journeys that they’re going through feel real emotionally, you can have a lot of fun in other ways.”
Finding the right soundtrack to the series was also a process of trial and error, but they eventually struck upon a strategy of using classic British Invasion songs covered by modern female British artists, with tracks from The Zombies, The Troggs, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.
“We’re retelling history through a feminist point of view, so why not retell musical history?” says Burgess. “We had a fantastic musical partner at Amazon and we had a music supervisor on the show, and they would put together endless playlists and we would listen to them and then respond with our favourites. What we were looking for with every band was a female swagger.”
Now streaming on Prime Video, My Lady Jane might not be for historical purists, but it promises to take viewers on a wild ride through the life Lady Jane Grey might have had, had circumstances worked out differently for her.
As Burgess says, “My Lady Jane is a feel-good, fast-paced, radical retelling of history for fans of The Princess Bride, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Blackadder.”
tagged in: Gemma Burgess, Meredith Glynn, My Lady Jane, Prime Video