Photo by Siebbi
Showtime is billing the characters
in their new series The Borgias as
“The original crime family.” People unfamiliar with history may be surprised to
find out that this isn’t a story about the creation of the Cosa Nostra in
Sicily but the tale of Pope Rodrigo
Borgia and
his reign in Rome. At a press event in anticipation of the new show, the cast
including Jeremy Irons and series Creator/Executive Producer/Writer/Director
Neil Jordan talked about corruption and power in the 15th century.
Jordan described the Borgias and how
the papacy was different from the modern day office. “It was Rome in 1492. The
popes had mistresses, shockingly. And the entire family were pretty hot and
lascivious.”
Irons acknowledged of his ruthlessly
ambitious character, “I think he's a pretty good guy just doing the best he
can. I mean, power corrupts. It was a time quite unlike the time we live in
today. There were murders in Rome every night, poisonings most weekends. There
was incest here and sodomy there. It was a good old rolling, rollicking
society.”
He joked, “I played him. I thought I
was quite a good guy. But George Bush probably thought he was quite a good guy,
too. I mean, they all do. Berlusconi, they think they're wonderful. Everybody
does… Stalin probably liked himself. It’s for us to judge them.”
But the corruption didn’t stop with
Rodrigo, Jordan called the whole Borgia clan “one of the most notorious
families to have lived. And Rodrigo Borgia definitely was one of the most
notorious men ever to have become Pope. He had a family. He had a beautiful
daughter Lucrezia, who became a byword for sinister female machination.”
Still Jordan expressed his desire to
look at a different side of Lucrezia. He stated, “We want to present her as a
real person and as a heroine, actually. So we're trying to do our best to tell
the truth, okay?”
Jordan added, “I tried to stay as
accurate to the broad historical shape as I could. But you didn't have to
invent much to make these guys fascinating… because what they went through was
actually extraordinary, quite extraordinary.”
Jordan intends to include the fact
that Rodrigo Borgia brought his family into the Vatican and included them in
internal affairs. He recounted, “He put his daughter in charge of St. Peter's
for a period. That doesn't happen in this season, but in the next it will. He
went away to do some business, and he left Lucrezia in charge of the Vatican,
which shocked the entire world at the time.”
Holliday Grainger, who plays
Rodrigo’s daughter, examined her character, saying, “There seems to be numerous
interpretations of Lucrezia, from being a complete victim of her family's power
and being a victim. And then at the other side, there are instances where she
really was the manipulative villainess that people believe. So I think there's
quite a lot of tension in her character.”
For his part Irons defended his
character, focusing on how the conflicted leader of church and state maneuvered
in his position. “He has, yes, religious convictions. I'm not sure all his
family did. That's another question. But I think he was a man who believed
implicitly in God and his position within the structure. But I think we have to
remember that he was more like a king than the present Pope. In other words,
the position of Pope was more civil than the position of the Pope these days.”
When the Academy Award-winning actor
started to research his role in The
Borgias, he found that it was easy to compare Rodrigo to some modern day
leaders. “If you read the newspapers over the last ten years to try to discover
what sort of man George Bush is, you read a whole load of different things. Whether
it's FOX or whether it's the New
Statesman or whoever it is writing, it's different opinions.”
He found similarities in the texts
written about a ruler who lived so many centuries ago. He remarked, “It's the
same when you're trying to get to, for my character, Rodrigo Borgia. What sort
of guy was he? You have to read a lot of different people and say, ‘Well, they
would have said that because...’ or ‘That's their standpoint.’ And from you
filter through all of that to try to find the heart of the character. That's
the only way I know how to do it.”
Jordan joked, “As a director, it's a
nightmare because they all come with the books about their character. ‘Hang on,
I didn't do that. Look, it says here he did this. It says here he did that.’”
But when push came to shove, Jordan
said that the events were all very well documented. Of Rodrigo he observed, “He
did try and protect the institution of the papacy with all the weapons that he
could muster. So it's not I don't think the Vatican or the Church will be
unhappy, because actually what we're making is about characters who were kind
of perched between God and mammon really.”
And while it’s difficult to ignore
the more scandalous things that the Borgias did, Jordan explained that it isn’t
his focus in telling their story. “I was more interested in the story in what
getting the greatest prize in the world has to give you does to the characters
and the family… There was ample opportunity for scandal there, but I was more
interested in the story of the power struggle to survive and what it does to
the family themselves.”
Watch the story unfold when The Borgias premiers on Sunday, April 3 at 9 p.m. EST/8 p.m. Central on Showtime.
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