Becoming Elizabeth's Tom Cullen on his 'charming,' 'heinous' real-life character
The A.V. Club: You’ve done your fair share of period dramas, so what was it about this take on Queen Elizabeth I’s life that appealed to you?I was really struck by how sharp and funny the writing was. It’s such a cliché when people talk about this stuff, but it felt so contemporary and all of the characters felt so three-dimensional, so fleshed out, and that felt quite rare. I think that it’s quite easy to deify these people, and this felt like the opposite of that.
I’m British, so before we learn to eat, we have history shoved down our throats, especially Queen Elizabeth I. [] She’s so iconic and so much of her story has been told so well and so often, but I was completely unfamiliar with this story [about Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour], and I found it quite shocking.
There were lots of things that were quite revealing. Obviously, Anya had done quite a lot of research, and I had to use her interpretation—because that’s what history is, right? It’s just [an] interpretation. Nobody knows what happened, really. It’s a series of documents and writings and anything that’s chronicled, but the bits in between—the human motivation—often are up for interpretation because rarely do people actually write down or say what they actually mean.
Later in the series, he especially makes some choices that feel so impulsive. And one thing that [Reiss and I] mooted around was Thomas might have been on the bipolar spectrum. It’s obviously never spoken about in the show, because it would be undiagnosed, and I didn’t tell any of the other actors that this is something that I was playing. But I do have someone very close to me who is on the bipolar spectrum, and I really recognized a lot of his behavior.
Elizabeth is a teenager. She is full of the confidence that teenagers feel when they feel like they know themselves in the world, but also they’re just way out of their depth, and they’re scared and alone. We really wanted to show that she’s confused, she possibly has feelings of love for Thomas, and so she doesn’t necessarily see it as abuse herself at first—that is obviously realized, I think, by episode four.
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