While the wait for Mary & George’s premiere on Starz feels like torture PRIDE did get some insight into what’s to come when star Nicolas Galitzine hit the red carpet for the highly (and we mean HIGHLY) anticipated series red carpet.
For those unfamiliar the series Mary & George is inspired by the incredible (and incredibly queer) true story of Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore) and her son George (Galitzine) who hatched a plot to seduce King James I (Tony Curran) and in doing so climb to the very top of the social and political hierarchy. It's steamy and dripping with political intrigue and with a cast like that, guaranteed to be one of the most fascinating projects of the year.
PRIDE’s Stacey Yvonne caught up with Galitzine on the red carpet to ask about why telling a true story like this is important in today’s political climate. “It's very topical in a lot of ways,” Galitzine tells PRIDE. “You see this woman, Mary, who does not have autonomy and has to forge a path for herself. I think we still live in a very patriarchal world and a lot of that needs to change.”
He points out that this show also succeeds in highlighting the kinds of stories that have both been intentionally and unintentionally erased. “Just the intrigue and the queerness, that existed during the Jacobean era, and indeed many other eras that have oftentimes been written out the history books [make this story important to tell]. Apart from anything, it's just a really fun, wild story that is based on real events.”
Ultimately as Galizine shares, it’s the journey of a powerful and complicated queer man that could so easily have gone unsung. “George's immense power at the time of his passing. He was basically the King of England. he had seized complete control, kind of threw the country into economic collapse and a lot of ways,” he says. ‘The thing that I tried to bring to George, which maybe isn't spoken about enough, is a certain vulnerability to him and a softness to him. Certainly, when we meet George, he's a very fragile young man. And I think it made his journey through the episodes very interesting to kind of start from that position and have it evolve.”
As for how the actor would approach the art of seduction through music, well he has his go-to jam. “I love 'For Your Precious Love' by Otis Redding,” Galitzine reveals. “That's spoken to me for a long time.”
