It’s been heralded as a worthy successor to Bridgerton, but there’s more to My Lady Jane than a roll in the hay, say its stars
HISTORY, ROMANCE, FANTASY, AND COMEDY: MY LADY JANE IS AN UNTAMEABLE BEAST, SAY CO-STARS EMILY BADER AND EDWARD BLUEMEL
Jonathan Prime
‘Let’s call a spade a spade,’ laughs Edward Bluemel, co-star of My Lady Jane, ‘there’s a lot of steamy sex.’ Indeed, this riotous reimagining of the life of Britain’s shortest-reigning monarch is a veritable miscellany of period drama romping. So varied are the iterations of intercourse between Bluemel’s Lord Guildford Dudley and Emily Bader’s very-much-alive Lady Jane Grey – corsets breathlessly unlaced in Tudor castles and caverns; breeches unbuttoned amid taverns and country piles – that it’s a shock the characters find time to get much else done. And yet. From regicidal attempts on the life of King Edward to queer awakenings and the rumblings of an interspecies civil war (more on that later), this cast of Machiavellian aristos are bashing far more than just the bishop.
With a cast as star-studded as that of My Lady Jane, thank the fidei defensor they are. Anna Chancellor plays Jane’s matrimonially ambitious mother (her first most talent? Gamesmanship. Her second? Don’t ask), Rob Brydon is Guildford’s father Lord Dudley and Dominic Cooper spends a fair deal of time in a roll-top bath as Lord Seymour.
SEX EDUCATION AND KILLING EVE STAR EDWARD BLUEMEL PLAYS LORD GUILDFORD DUDLEY IN MY LADY JANE
Jonathan Prime
And frankly, no one behaves themselves. Least of all the show’s historical advisors. The annals of history treat Lady Jane as ‘the ultimate damsel in distress’, known more for her untimely death after nine days on the throne than any semblance of a lifetime. Well, to quote the show’s plummy narrator: ‘f**k that’. Based on author Cynthia Hand’s best selling fantasy novel, the show imagines what would happen were Lady Jane not to suffer the inconvenience of state-endorsed decapitation, instead swashbuckling through the English countryside with the dashingly precocious Guildford. There are Drag Race references and Killing Eve style Wet Leg covers. There’s a spunky enemies-to-lovers storyline and a stunningly millennial sense of humour. Lady Jane Grey is, we are informed, canonically the first person in the world to use the line ‘do you come here often?’ and immediately the first to regret it. There is a lot of swearing. King Henry VIII is a ‘renowned s***thead’; marrying a ‘prat’ like Lord Guildford is ‘incon-f***ing-ceivable’; and life itself is described as a real kick in the unmentionables.
And somehow, none of this is the most dramatic deviation from the ledgers of the nation’s history books. That would be all the shapeshifting. It is a truth universally acknowledged, we discover early on in this genre-fluid show, that some people (or ethians) have the genetic ability to transmogrify into various animals. This, unsurprisingly, upsets many people in the show. It might also upset a certain type of period drama viewer.
DOMINIC COOPER AND ROB BRYDON PLAY A PAIR OF LOATHSOME LORDS IN THE REVISIONIST ROMP
Jonathan Prime
The biggest kick in the codpiece for pedants of Tudor precision? Enter Emily Bader. The Californian actress from sunny Temecula had never been to Britain before taking on the role of an English queen. Bader’s first day in the country was her first day of pre-production. ‘I wanted to just throw myself into it,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know what the countryside of England was like, I was meeting all these amazing people, having Sunday roasts, and learning the culture.’
CALIFORNIA COMES TO THE COUNTRYSIDE AS EMILY BADER EMBODIES NINE-DAY QUEEN LADY JANE GREY
Jonathan Prime
It’s a peculiar kind of method acting: Lady Jane, too, is thrust into a world completely unfamiliar to her, where relatives turn murderous and best friends turn volucrine. Perhaps that’s the reason Bader brings such charisma to the role, as well as an accent so convincing that Bluemel admits she fooled half the cast – both actor and character are on the brink of something great, pure potential exploding into Hampton Court Palace. ‘It felt like there was a kinship between me and her in that way,’ Bader says. ‘It’s all just a big adventure.’ After all, the pair joke at the same time – the chemistry between their characters obviously required little of their impressive talents – the best way to get to know a city is starring in a blockbuster Amazon Prime TV show. As for the historical naysayers, Bader has ‘made them all look really stupid,’ at least in the eyes of her co-star.
JORDAN PETERS AS KING EDWARD, ABBIE HERN AND KATE O’FLYNN AS PRINCESS MARY AND PRINCESS BESS
Jonathan Prime
Bader is perhaps best known for her work in indie horror, titles like Anonymous Killers and House of the Witch. With My Lady Jane, she’s suddenly found herself hitching up petticoats to run through English statelies and sitting down for dinners with some of the best comedic actors this country has to offer. Not that she recognised them. Gavin and Stacey hasn’t quite made it to Temecula. Brydon, who is clearly having a wail of a time playing catty aristocrats with Dominic Cooper, cottoned on to Bader’s transatlantic culture shock and immediately introduced her to a very British sense of humour. ‘He would recite Scottish poetry for, truly, 15 minutes between takes,’ the actress recalls, ‘and I would be just so devoutly listening.’ This was a master at work, but not in the way Bader had assumed. ‘It was fully improvised,’ she laughs, ‘just completely made up!’ Of course, sharing the screen with the actor is a learning curve in itself: ‘I don’t understand whatever’s in his brain: it’s brilliant, and I don’t understand it.’
ANNA CHANCELLOR AS LADY JANE’S MENACING MOTHER, LADY FRANCES GREY
Jonathan Prime
Bluemel, on the other hand, was keenly aware of Brydon’s iconic status this side of the pond. It was, he says, like a ‘strange hallucination’ playing the star’s son: ‘he’s been such an integral part of me wanting to become an actor, wanting to act in comedy – he’s a genuine inspiration.’
As inspirations go, Lady Jane Grey is a troublesome muse. The historical record is scant when it comes to the inner workings of the young woman’s mind, her motivations, her influences – there is simply not enough of it written down. For all of My Lady Jane’s radical revisionism, Bader says that the little we do know of the nine-day queen is crucial to the show’s feminist spirit: ‘she was incredibly educated, which as a woman at the time you weren’t supposed to be.’ Indeed, Lady Jane once wrote that she far preferred Plato to sport – though in this iteration she’s more than partial to a swords fight. The fact that Guildford respects Jane’s intellect, and continually challenges her, says Bader, is the reason for the spark between them – never has banter about Latin conjugations at a pub been so charged with eroticism. ‘He infuriates her, but she’s infatuated by him … which I think is deeply sexy.’
Bridgerton, Renegade Nell, and now My Lady Jane. All riotous revisions of the country’s history told from the reinvigorating perspective of their female protagonists. ‘We’re really looking at the full experience of what it means to be a woman in that time,’ summarises Bader: ‘they swear, they’re a bit naughty, they fight… you don’t normally get to see all sides of what it means to be a lady.’ Steamy sex and all.
