Screen queens: How new comedy drama The Great feeds our appetite for royal biopics

A luminous Elle Fanning is all fake smiles and “pretend, pretend, pretend” as Catherine the Great in Hulu’s comic period drama The Great. She’s already had a suicide attempt over her loveless marriage to the brutish emperor Peter III of Russia, played by Nicholas Hoult, who would have bumped her off in a carriage “accident” if she had continued to be a “miserable, scowling c***”. He tells her that “women are for seeding, not reading” and presents her with an infertile lover called Leo (Sebastian De Souza) because “our f***ing is as dull as a beaver chomping at a log”. He smashes drinking glasses against the wall, punches her in the stomach, and shoots dead her pet bear – all with a triumphant “Huzzah!”

This big-budget and visually majestic 10-hour series premiered in the US last week to rave reviews and arrives in the UK on StarzPlay on 18 June. It’ll also air on Channel 4 later this year. Yet another regal show to binge-watch, it arrives just six months after HBO’s take on the Russian empress – the Helen Mirren-starring Catherine the Great.

From Netflix’s The Crown to ITV’s Victoria, viewers have a seemingly insatiable appetite for queens on screen. Getting stuck into another royal biopic is an escape. What’s life like in a gilded cage? Fanning’s Catherine – who we first spot on a swing evoking Fragonard’s famous painting – is about to find out as she’s shipped off to Russia.

This whimsical take on Russian royalty has the lavish aesthetics of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) and the absurdity of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (2018) – which starred Olivia Coleman as the erratic Queen Anne. The latter comparison is unsurprising given that they share a screenwriter – Tony McNamara – whose 2008 theatrical version of The Great inspired Lanthimos to bring him on board for The Favourite.

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Could The Great be Hulu’s answer to The Crown? There’s certainly plenty of material to squeeze out of Catherine the Great’s life. As she plots a coup to overthrow the emperor with her maid Marial (Phoebe Fox) and the palace intellectual Orlo (Sacha Dhawan), she’s wonderfully power-hungry and naïve. She’s also desperate to make Russia vibrant with arts and science, as well as social reform.

But a rumour is circulating that she had sex with a horse. As she walks down the lavish palace corridors, resplendent in green, the ladies in the court neigh at her. How can she manage her reputation now?

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Fanning’s empress swiftly moves through self-doubt and as she gets closer to ruling Russia, her cut-glass accent becomes more pronounced, her voice now indistinguishable from Claire Foy’s Queen Elizabeth II or Jenna Coleman’s Queen Victoria. And she has that same steely glint in her eye – one that conveys a belief in the divine right of queens – that Cate Blanchett perfected as the young Queen Elizabeth I in 1998’s Elizabeth.

In one harrowing but darkly funny scene, Catherine visits an army camp in a fur-trimmed coat and feeds a fingerless soldier a macaroon while surrounded by corpses. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Catherine says. “I’ll just pop it in your mouth? It’s pistachio if that’s helpful.” She is as clueless as Dunst’s Marie Antoinette, who when told her subjects have no bread, says, “Let them eat cake” while soaking in the bath. But the horrors Catherine witnesses push her to make Russia a better place.

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Of course, some TV and film queens are better than others. Whether it’s Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie fighting over the crown in Mary Queen of Scots (2018), Mirren in her Oscar-winning role as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006); Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson battling over Henry VIII in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008); or Emily Blunt rising to power in The Young Victoria (2009), we never tire of the glamour and mystery these women embody behind palace walls.

We relate to their conflicts, self-doubt and messy relationships. It’s not the regalia that keeps us coming back for more, but the great lengths they will go to for the crown, the emotional wounds they deal with, their inner torment, their oversights, and the struggle to rule in a man’s world.

Fanning – like Coleman in The Favourite – succeeds in making her queen believable, despite the farce that’s unfolding around her. As she rises to power, it is as exhilarating as it is hilarious. And that is quite a feat.

‘The Great’ is on StarzPlay in the UK on 18 June