It wasn’t until we were smack in the middle of it that I realized the degree to which she was as manipulative and conniving.” I was focusing more beforehand on the scenes and the trajectory and the fun dialog. “I don’t think that I realized until we were actually in the midst of filming the degree to which she is contradictory. “There is very lawyerly elements to Johanna,” Anderson told Rotten Tomatoes ahead of the season premiere. A cunning and meddling woman whose life goal is to get all of her daughters wedded to royalty, she is none too thrilled that Catherine has not played her part as the dutiful wife. The female characters on the show certainly aren’t all saints for one, the second season also introduces Catherine’s mother, Johanna, played by Gillian Anderson. And so everyone’s kind of taking a little bit more risks.” “You can read the script and … it’s laugh-out-loud funny when you’re reading the words, but then … having a season 2, you get to know their character so deep and each person understands who they are on a deeper level now, as well. The humor is built into the script, Fanning told journalists in August. And if a way to wake them up is to shock them with a line that is so blasé about it, then I think that can be a good thing.” We’ve become so used to conversations about prevalent rape is and how it’s not prosecuted enough … people need waking up that it’s still a problem. “I quite enjoyed it because it’s shocking actually. “That’s actually what the show does: It takes really dark subjects and puts it into funny dialogue,” Fox said. Sometimes it’s even talked about as a joke. The challenges for women at the time can be seen in even the slightest turn of language. Last season, for instance, rape is casually mentioned as a fact of everyday life. But that is still true today to not get married is still seen as a bit abnormal for women.” “For Marial, choosing not to get married - choosing to have this autonomy - it makes you a bit of a pariah in Russia. “The season is about how hard it is to be in power, and how hard it is to be in power when you’re a woman particularly, because fundamentally, people think that you are a second-class citizen,” Phoebe Fox - who plays Catherine’s former lady’s maid and now newly restored lady of the court, Marial - told Rotten Tomatoes.
“Having Catherine kind of grappling with the fact that she is going to become a mother soon … and then also having to become a mother to the country - so the baby bump really symbolized a lot of things.”Īs Catherine makes gains, and a lot of mistakes, other women and girls notice and take action. “The season has a very parental theme running through it,” Fanning told reporters during the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour. The second season concentrates on how a pregnant Catherine manages things after her political coup that banished her husband, but lost her lover (Sebastian de Souza’s Leo). In the vein of Bridgerton and Dickinson, the show uses modern takes, and some creative license, to tell the story of how a naïve German girl who came to the country through an arranged marriage brought about radical change for women, religious views, and the arts.
The series stars Elle Fanning as the legendary (not horse-loving) Russian empress Catherine the Great and Nicholas Hoult as her conceited and dimwitted husband Peter III (who is very much not Peter the Great).
If the first season of Hulu’s biographical comedy The Great was about one woman realizing her power and how she can use it to take control of a country, the second season is about how all women can find ways to rebel against the patriarchy.