Mary & George “rollicks around like Love Island”
Award-winning costume designer Annie Symons reflects on working with Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine for the ultra-horny Jacobean period drama, Mary & George.
I wrongly assumed, after seeing various trailers and internet fodder, that the TV series Mary & George was about a sordid love affair between Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine’s characters. This was likely because the last thing I saw Julianne Moore in was May December, and Nicholas Galitzine, The Idea Of You (although the less said about that the better). Both films are centred around relationships with large age gaps and how wider society reacts to them.
However, I was on the right track, as Mary & George instead focuses on the affair between King James VI and I, and George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, son of Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham. The show is based on Benjamin Woolley's 2017 non-fiction book The King's Assassin, and is set in Jacobean England and Scotland, between 1603–1625 where James VI of Scotland also inherited the crown of England as James I (hence the dual title).
Annie Symons, the show’s costume designer, is somewhat of a legend. Her 40 year-long career spans film, TV, theatre and music, earning her BAFTA, Emmy and RTS [Royal Television Society] awards as well as many other nominations.
She tells me on a video call from North London, that Mary & George (which came out in March on Sky Atlantic) “rollicks around like Love Island in its approach” and despite being “based in a period of history that’s hardly been seen [on TV] at all” she believes “it turns a lot of expectations on the head, in that its subject matter is pretty fresh and relevant”.
King James (played by Tony Curran) proudly sleeps with men, despite being married to a woman. Mary maintains a long affair with prostitute Sandie (played by Niamh Algar) outside of her hetrosexual marriage of convenience. Throughout the course of the show, sexual orientation is rarely mentioned, and the phrase “bodies are just bodies” is uttered often.
“Sexual desire drives the narrative,” says Symons. “But it's also love, it's also power, it's a lot of things.” She explains that: “Oliver [Hermanus, the show’s director] is a gay man, and he was very keen to show the sexuality of these men with sensuality, not as camp or butch, or any of those things.” This meant plenty of gauzy, sheer shirts for intimate bedroom scenes between the king and his lover.
Symons says of Galitzine: “He really enjoyed the more sensual aspects of the clothes because his character really comes alive when he’s unbuttoned, as it were. As does [King] James, his clothes are always falling off him,” She laughs: “It’s quite funny really, I said to Tony [Curran] I make you all these nice costumes and you never bloody wear them!”
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