Minnie Driver on Her Fresh Take as the 'Wily' Elizabeth I in 'The Serpent Queen'

The delightfully wicked drama The Serpent Queen will get even more mischievous today with the addition of Minnie Driver in the role of Elizabeth I opposite Samantha Morton ’s Catherine de Medici.

These are two iconoclastic women unlike anyone else in the world at the time of their reigns and in an interesting move creator/showrunner Justin Haythe decided not to let the truth stand in the way of a great story and he brings them together in Paris for a face-to-face meeting when in real life, according to historians, the two never met but had a lively correspondence.

“I really do think what Justin created in this Elizabeth is a wit,” Driver told Parade in this exclusive interview when asked what attracted her to the role. “I definitely wanted there to be a slightly feral quality to her. I really felt that if you removed everything, this woman could still have a bare-fisted fight with anyone, but she’s so constrained by the clothes and the makeup and the stature. But there’s a wiliness and a wit in her that I really loved, and I really feel that she’s an extraordinary physical person. What I was thinking about was who she was without all of the everything. And then who she had to be when she was in this armor.”

In Driver’s premiere episode, “Death of a Prince,” news of the prophet Edith’s ( Isobel Jesper Jones) miracle spreads throughout Europe. The Bourbons ( Nick Burns as Antoine and Danny Kirrane as Louis) use this news to leverage an opportunity for Elizabeth I to exploit France, and Catherine  must urgently return to France when Anjou’s ( Stanley Morgan) temper causes Hercule ( Scott Folan ) to be dangerously injured.

During our chat, Driver also revealed that she has long been a fan of Elizabeth I, how she suffered for her art as the costumes while gorgeous required ice packs in the heat during filming, and why she thinks history looks kindly on Elizabeth but not Catherine.

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There’s a modern sensibility to Elizabeth in this production. Some of it is from the language, but also, there was the scene where the second prince of the blood ( Danny Kirrane) comes and she’s wearing pantaloons, which was very modern.

It was really modern, and that was working with Karen ( Muller Serreau) , the extraordinary costume designer. I’d done quite a lot of research and I said, “There must have been moments,” because she’s dancing and she’s doing her athletics when she takes the meeting [with the second prince of the blood]. I said, “Is there a way?” We had the Ottoman Empire happening at the same time as this renaissance in Europe. She would have seen pantaloons; she would have seen this whole idea. I loved maybe that she was this much more modern thinking woman, why wouldn’t she wear lace pantaloons when she’s doing her dancing lessons? There was something eccentric about it.

The costume designer was amazing and loved the idea and Justin liked the idea. So, there’s an eccentricity to Elizabeth in the way she does what she wants, even though she can’t really do what she wants because she’s a woman and she’s subject to all of these extraordinarily, I suppose, powerful men who are around her.

Overall, the costumes are stunning. You’ve talked about putting ice packs on your thighs because it was so hot. What was the experience like of having to wear these gorgeous outfits but then suffering for your art?

I think that’s probably it right there. It was actually brutal. The weight of the costumes and, for me, maybe the way my body is, being in corsets, the extraordinary pinching. But there was a massive amount of weight. I wore these huge—they’re called boudins, which is French for sausage, which is what makes the skirts kick out and have this huge shape. My costume and wigs were about 75 pounds. It was above 100 degrees every single day and we didn’t have air conditioning in the studios that we were shooting in.

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It was hard, horrible, and we did have ice packs strapped to our bodies, these cooling packs, which were amazing. I used to put my skirt over a fan when we were in between takes. The crew, the people that we worked with who took care of us, they were the most extraordinary people. Hair and makeup and the costume department, they just took care. They did as much as they could to make you feel comfortable.

These two women were both way ahead of their time. Is that part of the appeal?

Yeah, they were. It was brilliant. I would have wanted to play Elizabeth anyway, because I’ve been sort of low key in love with her my whole life. But to join this show, to already know what this show was, to know how good Samantha is—I didn’t know Samantha at all really, not personally, to be able to go head-to-head with another actress is really wonderful. You don’t have that opportunity enough, or I certainly haven’t. It was a really fantastic idea.

I had seen what Samantha had already done in Season 1 and where her Catherine de Medici was coming from, and they definitely needed someone with a bit of welly is what we’d say in England, to come and play Elizabeth. Catherine needed someone to be able to match her. And it was really fun. It was really interesting and really amazing to explore particularly this fabulated idea of what a meeting between them— because we know that it didn’t happen, but Justin has imagined so skillfully—what it might have looked like and how these two women who were businesswomen, how they ran it when they did. It wasn’t a rivalry; it was another boss lady.

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History hasn’t been kind to Catherine de Medici; much more so to Elizabeth I. What do you think the difference was?

As ever, I think women who have had to work their way to the top are treated less kindly. Words like manipulator and shrill or devious kind of attach to women who had to work for it, like Catherine de Medici. I think Elizabeth, because she was born into it, she was born for it, and she’d already suffered greatly by the age of 2 years old when her father had cut her mother’s head off, and yet she went on to not be mad, but to be a righteous and a just ruler.

I really loathe the two books that said that she was a rather safe queen. She wasn’t safe at all in my opinion. She was constantly under attack, whether it was people trying to kill her or remove her from the throne. I think that that is why. I think that there is a notion of a class system that there is more forgiveness shown to those that it was kind of given to, and Catherine de Medici had to scrap her way up to the top. She killed a lot of people. It’s not that Elizabeth didn’t, but really we only ever think about Mary, Queen of Scots.

The Serpent Queen airs new episodes Fridays at midnight on the STARZ app. On linear, new episodes debut on STARZ at 8 p.m. ET/PT in the U.S.

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