Emily Beecham has joked that her King & Conqueror co-star James Norton was “suffocated” by her wig during the sex scenes they shot for the BBC’s new historical drama.
The actor stars as Edith the Fair opposite Norton’s Harold Godwinson in the medieval period drama, a fictionalised retelling of the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England.
In an interview with Tatler magazine last week, Beecham, 41, said that filming intimate scenes with Norton, 40, was easy thanks to their decade-long friendship.
However, there were other complications. Norton apparently found shooting the show painful at times, as he broke his collarbone falling from a horse during the shoot in Iceland.
On top of this, Beecham’s auburn wig was “humungous” and often got in the way: “Especially lying in a bed with Harold or being on top of Harold and looking down at him,” she said.
“He’d get suffocated by this massive wig up his nostrils. That’s tricky. Or you roll onto the bed and accidentally tug the wig off.”
In a two-star review of the series, The Independent’s critic Nick Hilton warned that viewers might struggle due to the show being “almost unwatchably dark”.
“This has been an issue with so many BBC period dramas (Great Expectations, Jamaica Inn, The Luminaries etc) that it must also be interpreted as a conscious aesthetic choice,” he wrote.
“This was an era, after all, before electric light, so candlelit parleys have a certain logic. But when Stanley Kubrick used natural light to shoot Barry Lyndon, he accompanied it with a letter to projectionists. ‘An infinite amount of care was given to the look of Barry Lyndon,’ Kubrick wrote. ‘The careful handling of the film will make this effort worthwhile.’
“But TV viewers are not aided by a projectionist to monitor the lamberts and adjust the aspect ratio. They watch on TVs, laptops, mobile phones – and much of King & Conqueror will dissolve for them into blackness.”
Reviewing the cast’s performances, he described Norton and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s William the Conqueror as “rather bland vessels, bobbing along on the tide of internal politics… their wives [Beecham and Clémence Poésy as Matilda] are equally staid”.
Other critics were similarly unimpressed, with The Telegraph branding it “more Monty Python than Game of Thrones” and The Guardian noting that it “hangs a little too heavy” to achieve its goal of being a “ripping yarn”.
King & Conqueror is available to watch on BBC iPlayer now.
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