![Jodie Turner-Smith in 'Anne Boleyn'](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/AnneBoleyn_KA_VT-H-2021.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1)
There is one truly irresistible reason to watch Anne Boleyn, and her name is Jodie Turner-Smith. As the doomed queen of England, Turner-Smith exudes a presence so powerful it feels almost physical, as if she’s stepped through the screen and is waiting expectantly for your curtsy. If only the series around her lived up to the lucidity of her performance. Though writer Eve Hedderwick Turner and director Lynsey Miller aren’t short on interesting ideas or good intentions, their heavy-handed approach too often deadens the very world they’re trying to bring to life.
Anne Boleyn does succeed in positioning its title character as the protagonist of her own story rather than, as she’s often portrayed, just one of a rotating cast of women around Henry VIII (Mark Stanley). When the story first picks up with her in early 1536, she’s literally glowing. The candlelight of a crowded party glints off the gold shadow smeared around her eyes, the delicate chains woven into her hair, the pearls looped around her neck, the yellow satin wrapped around her body — which is swollen with what Anne expects will be Henry’s first legitimate male heir. Combined with Turner-Smith’s regal bearing, bright eyes and silky voice, these visual cues mark Anne as the sun around which the story revolves.
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Anne Boleyn
Airdate: Thursday, Dec. 9
Cast: Jodie Turner-Smith, Mark Stanley, Paapa Essiedu
Director: Lynsey Miller
Screenwriter: Eve Hedderwick Turner
Executive producer: Dan Jones
Unbeknownst to Anne, however, the clock is already ticking on her life. Before we get to the party, there’s a flash-forward to Anne’s guilty verdict, and title cards near the start of each episode count down the days until her death. By the start of the three-episode miniseries, she’s already down to five months. The choice to mark the passage of time relative to her death adds a bit of narrative tension to what’s already a well-known story, and addresses head-on the elephant in the room. We already know Anne’s story ends with Henry ordering her execution by beheading, so the question becomes how one woman’s fortunes could turn so dramatically, so swiftly.
But the framing has the additional effect of flattening everything onscreen into a series of puzzle pieces clicking into place. Anne’s miscarriage, her tempestuous personality, her jealousy over Henry’s interest in Jane Seymour (Lola Petticrew) or her rapidly cooling relationship with Thomas Cromwell (Barry Ward): All these elements serve to explain not who Anne was or what she represented to the people then and now, but simply why she died. Anne can’t so much as play a card game without stumbling into a metaphor about how Jane “had the winning hand all along.” At other times, characters blatantly spell out the series’ themes, informing Anne that “your influence lies in your belly, not your brain.”
To Hedderwick Turner’s credit, she carves out room within that too-tidy construction for Anne to be messy and unpredictable. She creeps into Henry’s bedchamber and chokes him in his sleep; it’s foreplay with a titillating shade of treason. She plants a kiss on Jane Seymour and declares that she understands the appeal, trying to come to terms with Henry’s wandering eye even as she increasingly rages against it. She’s as sincere in her prayers as she is in her relish for power. With a more timid actor, this mercuriality might come across as inconsistency — or worse, as markers of that dreaded biopic tendency to check off boxes rather than connect the dots. Turner-Smith wears these moods as confidently as she does Anne’s extravagant gowns, weaving them together into a portrait of a woman equal parts frustrating and enchanting.
Yet Anne Boleyn as a whole feels like a missed opportunity. The series is blunt in condemning the misogyny that condemned Anne, going so far as to have the character deliver a speech acknowledging that “I have dreamt of flying, when people told me I should be happy with the nest.” (As I said, subtlety is not the show’s strong suit.) Anne’s marginalization is further emphasized by the choice to cast her as a Black woman, one of only a handful of non-white actors among a mostly white cast. But having raised these basic if valid points, Anne Boleyn seems satisfied that its work here is finished.
Put another way, it lacks the ambition that made its subject a figure of such endless fascination. The miniseries makes minimal effort to flesh out the racial dynamics it introduces with its casting, to deepen the characters around Anne more generally (including Paapa Essiedu’s likable George Boleyn, who becomes collateral damage to his sister’s downfall), or to grapple more fully with the racial dynamics it introduces. We witness little of the brilliant political machinations that put her in this position to begin with, and even less of the larger historical context of her life and times.
We are left instead to cobble together an understanding of the bigger picture from snatches of conversation and our own recollections from history classes or other Henry VIII-centric shows and movies, and simply imagine what Anne must have been like at the center of it all. It’s as if we’ve opened a delicious novel about Anne, only to discover that all but the final pages have been ripped out. That I wish I could go back to read it from the beginning is a testament to both the series’ triumphs and its shortcomings.
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