Max om skillnaden mellan The Host och The White Queen

Max Irons gjorde nyligen en intervju med The Hollywood Reporter om hans kommande roll som kung Edvard i mini-serien The White Queen. Där han bland annat säger att det var skönt att få göra en mini-serie efter The Host.

The period drama, based on Philippa Gregory’s bestselling trilogy of novels ”The Cousins War,” is due to debut on Starz and BBC One later this year.

CANNES — As the cable networks continue to expand their domination of the premium drama space, Starz is adding to the increasingly competitive terrain with preparations for a ten-episode sweeping costume series, The White Queen for a debut later this year.

“The stakes are so high it’s not like a family quarrel, it’s like the mafia. If you move against somebody, it’s death for you or him,” says author Philippa Gregory, promising audiences won’t be bored by the historical setting of The White Queen. Her best-selling trilogy The Cousins War, which is the basis for the series, is part history, part pure story. “It’s really a hybrid product,” she says.

The author and star Max Irons were in Cannes this week to promote season one, which debuts on Starz in the U.S. and BBC One in the U.K. later this year, though a premiere date has not been set. Irons, who is currently starring in teen sci-fi thriller The Host, appears as King Edward IV, whose decade-long power struggle for the throne is dramatized in the first season.

Filming the series at a slow and intricate pace was essential to capture the feeling of both the novels and the period, the author and actor say.

“I’m rather glad we did it as television to have ten hours for these very complex novels. You have a lot of characters and they’ve got be introduced with interest — not, ‘Here’s a king and his court,’ or worse, ‘Here’s this one bloke and six wives and that’s it,’” said Gregory, who is no stranger to adaptations. Her 2001 historical novel The Other Boleyn Girl was the basis for the 2008 movie starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson. “You have time to tell the backstory, who’s coming together, rivalries and eventual victories. You’d never get that in an hour and a half.”

“After The Host, it’s a really nice transition. The Host is a film aimed at 13-year-olds, and it was a 700-page novel that had to be boiled down to a 100-page script, so a lot of corners had to be cut,” explained Irons.  “So when you find yourself working on something like this where you have so much time to tell an intricate story, you see all these rivers colliding.”

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