“Art is supposed to challenge you,” she said. “There is very little room for someone brown to touch the monarchy,” said Turner-Smith - who, upon being cast as Anne, fully expected the move to draw criticism in the country.įor the actress, that presented even more reason to push back against people’s assumptions about Anne. “It represents how far we have not come in terms of the monarchy and in terms of somebody being an outsider and being different, and being able to navigate that space,” she said, adding that “you can draw so many parallels if you look for them” between Anne and Meghan’s attempts to figure out life within a British palace.
Meghan’s treatment by the palace - which she told Oprah Winfrey in a bombshell March interview had driven her to thoughts of suicide - is representative of “just how far we have not come with patriarchal values,” Turner-Smith said. “The past is only a safe space if it becomes a learning space open to all,” she wrote in praise of the series.
Olivette Otele, a professor of the history of slavery and memory of enslavement at the University of Bristol, noted in The Independent newspaper that the series arrived at a time when Britain was “soul searching” about how to understand its colonial past. Others, though, have welcomed the show’s perspective. In the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, the writer Marianka Swain called Turner-Smith’s casting “pretty cynical” and wrote that it was designed to have “Twitter frothing rather than adding anything to our understanding of an era.” “I thought it was interesting to bring the freshness of a Black body telling that story.”Ĭasting Turner-Smith as one of Britain’s best-known royal consorts has caused debate in the press and particularly on social media in Britain, with “Anne Boleyn” trending on Twitter the day after the series premiere. I have a lived experience of what limitation and marginalization feel like,” Turner-Smith, 34, said in an interview.
“As a Black woman, I can understand being marginalized. In the three episode-long series, Anne is played by Jodie Turner-Smith, best-known for her role in the film “ Queen & Slim.” It is the first time a Black actress has portrayed the Tudor queen onscreen.įor Turner-Smith, that meant connecting her experiences with the ways in which Anne, who was raised in the French court, was an outsider and suffered at Henry’s court. It is generally told as a morally dubious young woman seducing an older king into leaving his wife and his church, before she is executed for failing to give birth to a male heir.īut the new mini-series, which premiered last week on Channel 5, one of Britain’s public service broadcasters, attempts to reframe Anne’s story, instead focusing on her final months and how she tried to maintain power in a system that guaranteed her very little. When the new mini-series “Anne Boleyn” opens, it’s 1536, the queen is pregnant and powerful - and has five months left to live.Īnne’s story, which occupies a special place in the British collective imagination, has spawned an abundance of fictionalized depictions onscreen (“ The Tudors”) and in literature (“ Wolf Hall”). LONDON - Britain’s most recent rendering of the story of Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII’s six wives, begins at the end.