This Week On TV One

Sunday Theatre: The Tudors, Sunday 25 October, 8.30pm: Starring Golden Globe-winner Jonathan Rhys Meyers, season three of The Tudors begins with the marriage of Henry (Rhys Meyers, Elvis) to his third wife, Jane Seymour (Annabelle Wallis, True True Lie), tonight at 8.30pm on TV ONE.

In contrast to the scheming upstart Anne Boleyn, Jane is a shy and demure young woman of noble birth, given away on her wedding day by her brother Edward Seymour (Max Brown, Mistresses). Henry's wife may have changed, but his marital ambition remains constant - siring a male heir to the Tudor Dynasty. Though the Queen's pregnancy is cause to rejoice, Henry is faced with mounting threats to his authority from a commoners' revolt inside England, and an angry Pope determined to stem Protestantism's rising tide. As attacks on his new church foreshadow trouble for the King, the increasingly powerful Thomas Cromwell (James Frain, Empire) doubles his efforts to crush Catholicism across England. When Jane dies shortly after giving birth to Henry's first son, Cromwell looks to capitalise on the tragedy - to find a new wife who will bring with her the alliances needed to stave-off a Catholic invasion - only to be undermined by Henry's staunchest supporters. And as an anguished Henry struggles to codify his position as the head of the new church, no one is safe from his growing madness. Jonathan Rhys Meyers says Henry finds himself in a dark place this season and faces a lot of anxiety: "The combination of all the trauma that he's been through ever since being a child, remember being a child at this time was very, very difficult, he was king at 16 years old, he had all this responsibility, and death was very much a part of his life, it's very apparent. "He's got an illness in his leg, which is affecting his brain because of the poison in the ulcer, so he's going into that dark place of psychosis, that madness of power, having too much power and having nobody to stop you." He says Henry is also getting older and his vanity is becoming affected. "He enjoyed being that young vibrant king, and this is what we wanted to portray in The Tudors." Rhys Meyers says he was chosen for this reason: "They could have done this with a different actor, not me. They could have cast somebody who immediately looks like the Holbein painting, but it's already been done, and done by many other people. The way we've done it, is we tried to bring something quite new." In playing Henry, he says he wanted to stay away from that wild loush, sort of incredibly flagrant king. "I wanted to bring him as someone who is very very controlled, very mannered. There's something almost psychotically sort of methodical about the things that he does, especially in season one as the kind of spoilt brat king, because he was, he's an incredibly spoilt man, probably one of the most spoilt kings in history." The new season of The Tudors starts tonight at 8.30pm on TV ONE.


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