the times | Monday June 13 2022 9arts
Jessica Raine), tells Elizabeth. “Choose
who you wish to think is using you.”
One of the directors of Becoming
Elizabeth, Justin Chadwick (Spooks,
Bleak House), told von Rittberg it was
fine if her accent had “the occasional
something that you can’t really nail
down. Something a bit otherworldly,”
she says. “This Queen’s English is
something we only know from other
films, other series. Who tells us that
they actually spoke that way?”
Her first attempts at acting in
English were “absolutely ridiculous. I
started learning English when I was in
kindergarten and I’ve been living in
the UK for four years and it still was
so bad,” she says, in the kind of
apologetic tone that you never hear
from a Brit learning German. Her
audition as Elizabeth was “the worst
I’ve ever done”, she says. All she could
think about was the accent. Yet they
saw something in her. “I was shocked,”
she says. “I would have not seen that
in the girl I was two years ago.”
She spent lockdown working with
Penny Dyer, the “brilliant” dialect
coach who helped Benedict
Cumberbatch with his American
accent on The Mauritanian and
prepared Cate Blanchett for playing an
older Elizabeth in The Golden Age. “IP
lenty of actors have
played historical figures
from other countries,
from Elizabeth Taylor
(Cleopatra) to David
Oyelowo (Martin Luther
King in Selma). Not
many have done so in a
second language. That’s the challenge
for the German actress Alicia von
Rittberg in Becoming Elizabeth, a
toothsome new British series in which
she plays a young Elizabeth I. Imagine
Robert Pattinson playing Otto von
Bismarck. In German.
There is precedent: Isabelle Huppert
played Mary Stuart on stage in
French-accented English, with the
dubious caveat that the queen had
grown up in France, and Ralph
Fiennes portrayed the ballet dancer
Alexander Pushkin in Russian in The
White Crow. Neither role was as iconic
as Elizabeth, though. For von Rittberg,
best known here for a small role in the
Brad Pitt war flick Fury, playing her
must have been terrifying.
“It was!” she says by Zoom from her
home in Notting Hill, west London.
“But everyone’s been so welcoming. It
tells us how the industry is opening up
and how everything is possible.”
Today, von Rittberg, 28, is speakingimmaculate English with the tiniest of
accents, as she does in the show. If her
Elizabeth’s vowels are occasionally
more Teutonic than Tudor, that
doesn’t detract from the nuanced
portrayal of a character who is 14 in
episode one, mourning her father,
Henry VIII, and watching her half-
brother, Edward VI, take the throne.
Von Rittberg balances naivety with
the beginnings of the nous that would
serve Elizabeth so well later in life.
Romola Garai, who plays Elizabeth’s
other half-sibling, Mary, thinks the
series, created by the playwright
Anya Reiss, is strongly influenced by
Succession. “You could be having a
drink in the morning and have your
head chopped off by afternoon,” Garai
says. Von Rittberg adds The Sopranos
to the list of scheming touchstones.
“We all use each other,” Henry’s
widow, Catherine Parr (a sardonicwould run around with earphones and
listen to Kate Winslet because she has
the perfect British accent we were
looking for,” von Rittberg says. She
also read Shakespeare, “which I loved,
and then Elizabeth herself wrote a few
little poems and some letters. So we
could imagine her voice, which is very
important in that research process.”
As her surname suggests, von
Rittberg comes from nobility herself.
She is technically a countess, “but we
don’t have a monarchy any more so it
doesn’t really mean anything”, she
says. “It’s a name. People make a lot of
assumptions based on that name but
they’re not right.” That she will be
snooty? “Yeah, or they would say
things like, ‘Alicia doesn’t have to workbecause she’s a countess.’ It’s
ridiculous.” She grew up in Munich,
where her father is the director of an
investment firm — a comfortable life
but not an aristocratic one.
The debate about posh actors
doesn’t happen in Germany, she says,
because “not many come from
privileged families there”. Nor does
she think her background helps her to
play Elizabeth: “She grew up in such a
dangerous and different time. You still
felt God-anointed when you were a
queen. That confidence! I want to
meet that person.”
There has been much speculation
about Elizabeth’s bedroom exploits but
at the start of the series the future
Virgin Queen is definitely still a virgin.
Not for long, if Thomas Seymour has
anything to do with it. The brother of
Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife,
Thomas married Parr, Henry’s sixth,
in 1547, the year the king died. Parr is,
von Rittberg thinks, “the closest thing
to a mother figure” Elizabeth has but
that doesn’t stop Seymour from flirting
outrageously with his smitten teenage
stepdaughter-to-be. He is grooming
her, sexually and politically.
“I would have never thought it was
such a dark and lonely and horrible
world,” von Rittberg says. “I didn’t
know that she was manipulated in the
way she was.” Elizabeth’s relationship
with Seymour, played with swaggering
immorality by Tom Cullen, is “the
most fascinating thing” about the
show, she says. “The way you, through
her eyes, fall in love with this person.
You’re so tricked by this charming
man. And then when she wakes up,
you as a viewer do the same.”
At first, though, she believed
that Seymour “absolutely loves
Elizabeth. Anya Reiss and Tom
Cullen looked at me with open
mouths. They were, like, ‘You’re
brainwashed!’ Because I was
arguing in favour of a seriously
dangerous guy.” Reiss and her
women co-writers show Elizabeth
playing politics in “a feminine way
rather than trying to adapt to a
masculine way”, von Rittberg says.
“That would have probably not
been possible without that strong
female writers’ room.”
It was certainly a less
testosterone-fuelled environment
than Fury, the Second World War tank
drama she shot in 2013, when she was- “I was there for a month, taking it
all in, learning — a bit like Elizabeth,”
she says. Watching Pitt, she came to
understand “why someone is that
successful, because they are just so
focused and brilliant at what they do”.
Von Rittberg, who is single, has
regular work in German television and
film but she wants to act in English
again. And playing Elizabeth has
shown her why we Brits are so
obsessed with the Tudors. “It’s just
madness!” she says with a laugh. “A
family where each character is so
complex and it’s a fight for survival.
The stakes are so high and the clock is
always ticking.”
How this German actress
became the queen of England
Alicia von Rittberg
talks to Ed Potton
about playing
Elizabeth I in a
new TV series
Alicia von Rittberg.
Right: with Tom
Cullen as Thomas
Seymour in
Becoming ElizabethI didn’t know that
Elizabeth was
manipulated in
the way she was
NICK THOMPSONA new episode of
Becoming Elizabeth
will be available
every Sunday on
Starzplay, with the
first streaming nowyth
E C m b a d w p r m “ bfet
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