Firebrand is unlike many period dramas fans have come to expect, though it may appear to be with its stars, Academy Award-nominee Jude Law (Peter Pan & Wendy) and Alicia Vikander (The Green Knight), in Tudor garb, playing the roles of King Henry VIII and the wife who survived, Katherine Parr. The way it was approached by filmmaker Karim Aïnouz (Mariner of the Mountains) is as a heart-pounding thriller that trims down the pageantry to a boiling look at the final four years of this untold relationship. In this interview with Collider's Steve Weintraub, Law and Vikander share their insight and preparation for bringing these two historical lives to screen.
Alicia Vikander is Katherine Parr, the volatile King Henry's sixth and final wife. The Queen became known as a gentle spirit who tended to the King's failing health, as well as nurturing his children, but how she survived her dangerous husband is often overlooked. Based on the scripts of Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth (Killing Eve), inspired by Elizabeth Fremantle's novel Queen's Gambit, Aïnouz opts to tell this harrowing narrative as a suspenseful, dark fairy tale that leans heavily into historical fiction in favor of psychological horror.
As for the King, Jude Law is nearly unrecognizable as the paranoid, violent Henry VIII, and discusses how he and Vikander "both did a lot of reading, a lot of prep, [and] talking to historians" to give life to what we now only know as history on pages. He also shares his views on Henry VIII, attributing the King's murderous reign as a product of his upbringing. "This sense of answering only to God, that your will is the way of God, is insane," Law muses, "And he used it brutally."
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