The Spanish Princess's Charlotte Hope on Breaking the Infertility Taboo on TV
At the beginning of this season of The Spanish Princess, it seems like Catherine has everything she ever wanted: a loving husband, a son, and a seat on England's throne. But even the most lax student of European history is aware that's not how her story ends.
"We get to play with knowing how the story is going to end, and yet, we kid you that maybe it's going to be okay. It almost kind of feels a bit like a horror movie to me in that sense," Charlotte Hope, the actress who plays Henry VIII's first wife, said via Zoom.
"We meet Catherine and she's got her handsome husband. She's got her 6-month-old baby boy. And she's just living her best life to be honest. But also as a viewer, there's a sense of foreboding, even in the total jubilation. I think that is a really brilliant piece of storytelling."
Here, Hope breaks down the season and opens up about how Catherine's struggles are more modern than they might initially appear.
You all wrapped this season right as the pandemic hit Europe. What was that like?
It was weirdly fortuitous. We finished on March 12, but it also made the end of filming quite weird. The end of season one had been so overwhelming for me. And I remember the last few days just being so sad and like really relishing it. And I thought that this season would be way worse, but actually when it came to it—because like stuff was starting to get pretty crazy with Coronavirus, and I was also incredibly sick, but to be honest the last few days were just a question of: we just need to get it finished. And so it wasn't really until a few weeks afterwards that it really hit me, that it was over. And then I was really sad.
Something I really enjoy about the show is that you see women talking with their friends about a wide swath of topics. Tell me about Catherine’s relationships with the other women on the series.
I think that what [co-showrunners] Emma [Frost] and Matthew [Graham] did so brilliantly in the writing is to make the female friendships really complicated. The Lina and Catherine storyline is so flawed and so difficult. And it would have been really easy for Lina and Catherine to just be best buddies and to have each other's back through this huge turmoil. But instead they plotted this really complicated relationship where the two women really love each other and they are bound like sisters, but also Catherine is deeply jealous of Lina because she's got everything that she wanted. And Lina feels like she's giving too much of herself to Catherine and not enough to herself.
And they're in this constant power dynamic battle, and that just feels really honest to me because my female friendships are really complicated and those are so rarely given space on television.
In the second episode, Oveido says “Childbirth and war: they both bring pain. Both challenge those who face them. One finds the woman and one finds the man,” and Catherine echoes it later on. Why do you think it’s important to tell stories about childbirth and fertility?
This story just felt really important to me as a woman in 2020. I got diagnosed with PCOS when I was 18 and the doctor told me that I should have children before I was 30—which is just a very terrifying thing to tell an 18-year-old-girl. And that has informed a lot of my life choices and a lot of my existential angst. And so, when I got this part of a woman who is struggling to have a child, but who so desperately wants it, that felt really relevant to me. I haven't gone through as many miscarriages as Catherine has had, but it feels as important a story to me and to most of my girlfriends in 2020, as it does as a Tudor period piece.
I think that miscarriage and infertility and struggles with IVF are things that so many women struggle with today, but are still taboo subjects. And so I think that being able to explore them through these historical figures is really important, but also just really real. I really relate to Catherine. She ultimately is a woman trying to do it all. She's trying to juggle being a mother and a wife and have a career and be a friend and she can't do it all. And that's like most modern women's problems.
Would you call her a feminist?
Definitely. Well, I guess that she's a feminist operating in a patriarchal society, but Catherine was brought up by Isabella who—Isabella and Ferdinand had traditionally this incredibly equal marriage. If anything, Isabella was the warrior and Ferdinand was the politician. And I think that Catherine really brings that into her understanding of gender and into her understanding of her relationship with Henry. When we meet them at the beginning of season two, it really feels like an equal partnership. They're doing this together. They're making the political choices together. And it's only when she is not able to give him an heir that he starts to question the equality of her position in the marriage.
What do you think when the show strays from what is generally accepted as historic fact?
The thing about history is that—Emma [Frost, co-showrunner of the series] said, "Ultimately history is written by historians who were largely white men, so the history books will tell you much more about those men than it will tell you about what actually happened." That's not to say that I think that history books are inaccurate, but I do think that they are a source rather than the whole material.
And this show is ultimately a fiction. Catherine didn't go to war in armor, but she did give a really rousing speech. And I think that it was really important in our story for us to have the visualization of that power on the battlefield. I think that makes a story incredibly powerful, and also, it meant that I got a chance to go into battle, which was really, really fun.
I know that there are forums online where they're questioning our historical accuracy, but for me it feels like an expansion of an already incredibly rich story. We don't have any historical evidence for Lina and Oviedo, but that doesn't mean that they didn't exist. I guess that's what I mean about the history books telling you more about the historians. We don't have much written evidence about Lina and Oviedo, but that didn't mean that they didn't have really full and rich lives. Likewise, we know a lot about Catherine's story, but there's also a lot that we don't know. And it's really exciting with a piece of fiction to imagine what she might have been thinking and what she might have been going through.
I wanted to ask you about the battle where Catherine rides into battle with armor protecting her pregnant belly. What was it like filming those scenes?
Oh, it was magical. I'm a small person; I'm five foot three; I'm tiny. I never get to play the bad-ass characters. So it was just really satisfying to get to be in the mud, fighting, dressed in armor, riding a horse. I'd spent so much time crying that just getting a chance to go and let rip with some anger felt really satisfying. I'm basically now desperate to do an action movie. I've done nothing in lockdown except getting really good at lifting weights, and CrossFit. I keep sending messages to my agents like, "Action movie next." And so when the trailer came out, I was like, "See guys, I can be badass. I promise."
There are interesting parallels between this show and our current moment. How do you think it will be received right now?
A lot of the issues of the show are really pertinent. Divorce and motherhood and infertility, those issues feel important to me as a woman in 2020. But also, this is really a story of resilience and perseverance and not giving up. I’ve had a pretty rough time in 2020, and I’ve felt knocked sideways a lot of times. And sometimes, I have to remember that there is a woman in me somewhere, in my muscle memory, that was so strong and never gave up. Catherine went through the ringer and every single time she kept on getting up.
And a lot of times in 2020 where I've been on the floor, I've remembered that somewhere in my waters, there's a woman that wouldn't give up, and it inspires me.
I saw you post about Black Lives Matter on your Instagram. Why do you think the representation of Black characters is important for a period drama like The Spanish Princess?
More than anything because they were there. I think that so often we've got caught up in the idea that historical events were all dominated by white men, and it just simply isn't true. There were black people in the Tudor court, 50% of the population was made up by women, and their stories are as interesting, if not more interesting because they haven't been told, so it doesn't feel like representation for representations sake. It feels like this is an opportunity to tell a story that we haven't told before.
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