This story about Elle Fanning and “The Great” first appeared in the comedy series theme from TheWrap Awards Magazine.
There is a scene in Tony McNamara’s “The Great” Season 3 Episode 4 in which Elle Fanning’s Catherine the Great has a big argument with her husband, the deposed Russian Emperor Peter III, about their joy over the fact that that your child’s first word is Pussy. After the screaming ends, Catherine bursts into an empty room, throws her head back and screams at the top of her lungs, and the camera, looming over her, has a perfect view straight down her throat to an unnerving depth.
“We all laughed after that take, and Tony was like, ‘We basically saw inside your body,’” Fanning said with a laugh. “Was No An attractive shot, but we don’t mind looking attractive on this show.”
For three seasons, “The Great” has been taking a period drama and subverting all that fancy dress and ornate furniture with ridiculously profane antics and over-the-top excesses that have only a passing relationship to what actually happened in 18th-century Russia. . A playwright and screenwriter who turned to this program after writing the Oscar-winning film “The Favourite,” McNamara gave Fanning her first major comedic role and made her executive producer of the wickedly funny and irreverent Hulu series, What that allowed him to learn his way. around gritty comedy in the same way that Catherine learns to navigate the vicious politics of the Russian court.
“The first season, everything was new to me,” Fanning said of the show, which required her to not only lose her vanity, but develop great comedic timing with Nicholas Hoult, who plays Peter, as they navigated the words of a writer: director who demands total precision in the midst of madness. “Tony is brutal with us about being perfect with words,” he said. “Memorization always feels like you’re preparing for a grand finale every night—your brain is on fire. But I live for the challenge. I like to feel terrified.”
For McNamara, Fanning’s growth over three seasons has been particularly notable in the way she’s learned to deal with humor. “She has really worked,” she said. “That was what made her nervous the most, and she was surrounded by great comedians: Nick and Belinda (Bromilow), Doug (Hodge) and Adam (Godley), really great comedic actors. But she really stands her ground with all of them, which has been an important thing for her and for us to discover as we’ve gone through these seasons together.”
If Fanning likes to feel terrified, she had a particular reason for feeling that way in Season 3, for reasons that constitute major spoilers for those who haven’t seen the season. (If she didn’t watch at least the first six episodes, stop reading.) Midway through the season, the deliciously complicated relationship between Catherine and Peter is cut short when Peter suddenly falls through the ice onto a frozen lake and sinks into the murky lake. depths, leaving Catherine without the soul mate that drove her crazy and Fanning without her partner in one of the most delicious relationships on television.
“I never planned for the show to be this kind of love story, but I changed my mind while watching Elle and Nick together on screen,” McNamara said. “Seeing them together, I thought, ‘Oh, he would really fall for her.’ And then in Season 2, we managed to convince ourselves of the same thing about her. So I ended up building the show around this idea of a marriage that was a great love story but also untenable for her characters: she can’t run this country and still be married to him. At some point during season 2, I knew we would have to kill off Peter in season 3. But how do we kill off Nick, and how can that be good for the audience?
She also knew that death would be great for Catherine the Great. “I was aware of how much of Catherine’s (real) story has not been told on the show,” she said. “For most of her history, she wasn’t married and she didn’t have anyone, that was a big part of who she became and why she was the leader that she was. So she knew that she had to bite the bullet (and kill Peter) in order to tell Season 4 the way we wanted to.”
When Peter’s death comes two-thirds into the season, the stakes are raised for Fanning. “I put a lot of pressure on myself, because it opened doors for people to say, ‘Oh, it’s not so good now that he’s gone,’” he said. “But Tony had a brilliant idea and he played us a podcast about a father and daughter who had lost his mother, and the father entered this manic duel. He was afflicted in complete mania, not acting like himself, in complete denial. And we decided that this was what we were going to give Catherine. It can’t just go dark, because we’re a comedy, so we have to balance the line between dark and sad and comedy and energetic.”
At the same time, coming to work without Hoult (who went on to play a smaller role as Peter’s double) took its toll. “It was completely emotional,” he said. “He was crying all the time. That’s a testament to how great Nick is, because he made Peter live so long. He would walk through the sets feeling his presence and feeling the emptiness. Nick and I are going to work together again many times, but the saddest part is that we won’t be playing these characters.” She paused. “In our last scene at the lake, we couldn’t even get past rehearsals that day because we were crying so hard.”
McNamara said he had to deal with it, too. “The entire cast was in mourning,” he said. “I had a really hard time making them funny, because they were upset about Nick.”
“The Great”‘s version of Russian history is, for the most part, fictionalized to an extreme degree for comedy’s sake, but is it getting harder to make fun of Russian leaders in our world today? “I asked Tony about it, but our show could be anywhere,” Fanning said. “I mean, Catherine’s period was the Enlightenment, which is the opposite of what’s happening now. I think Putin tried to say that he looked a lot like Catherine in a speech the other day, which is not true.”
“I don’t think the show has ever been about Russia for us,” McNamara added. “In a weird way, it was more Western, more about the US, the UK, Australia. We are writing about our own cultures, about the leader who doesn’t want to leave.”
Still, “The Great” certainly seems to refer to present times when Catherine is visited by the US ambassador to ask Russia for help in her war of independence. The two talk about democratic ideals, argue a bit, have sex, and then talk about cementing the great relationship between Russia and the United States “forever.”
“Tony did that on purpose,” Fanning said, laughing. “I mean that I think so.”
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