For a guy playing Henry VIII, Jonathan Rhys Meyers was looking very skinny in his jeans, relaxing in a trailer on the Irish set of Showtime’s steamy drama “The Tudors.”
The series returns for its second season at 8 p.m. Sunday.
“I have got absolutely no physical attributes in common with Henry VIII,” Rhys Meyers said. “So everything has to be more about his energy, more about power, more about confidence.”
He had just filmed a scene set shortly before Henry and Anne Boleyn’s wedding, which history tells us took place when the king was in his early 40s. Rhys Meyers is 30.
“Henry is 30,” too, this season, he said. “He’s going to stay 30 for a while.”
He also will stay slim, although Rhys Meyers has been eating voraciously to put on a few royal pounds.
“You don’t want to see a skinny guy in a big fat suit,” he said. “Unless it’s Eddie Murphy.”
Michael Hirst, the show’s creator and writer, will defend every single decision he has made to change historical facts.
“Showtime commissioned me to write an entertainment, a soap opera, and not history,” said Hirst, taking a break in an office at Ardmore Studios, near Dublin. “And we wanted people to watch it.”
For Hirst, it was more important to emphasize the similarities between 16th Century England and the current era.
“I mean, who is Henry but a man who’s married to an older woman who falls in love with a younger one and wants to marry her?” Hirst asked. “We’ve seen that.”
Natalie Dormer, who plays Anne, found it easy to see her as a contemporary. She said there were strong likenesses between her character and a more recent British royal beauty: Diana, Princess of Wales.
“They were both incredibly image conscious,” said Dormer, 26. “Anne Boleyn shook up the court in an aesthetic way.”
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