Strong-willed London madams battle for control in Hulu's 'Harlot'

The year is 1763 and everything in London is for sale, including its women. That's the setting for a new period drama premiering next week on Hulu.

In “Harlots,” dropping with eight episodes on Wednesday, March 29, Oscar nominee Samantha Morton stars as Margaret Wells, a strong-willed madam struggling to reconcile her career choice with her role as a mother to Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) and Lucy (Eloise Smyth). All the while, she's fighting off attacks from a business rival, a ruthless brothel owner by the name of Lydia Quigley (Lesley Manville), with whom she has a long history.

As these archrivals do battle for their share of the London hospitality market, everything is at stake for Margaret, including her livelihood, her family and even her life.

Morton says she was excited to work with Manville, producers Moira Buffini, Alison Owen and Debra Hayward and director Coky Giedroyc. She also admits she was “hungry” to play a character like Margaret.

“She's incredibly witty, incredibly strong, funny, feisty — you wouldn't mess with her, you wouldn't cross her,” Morton says of Margaret. “She's got a code. She seemed very gangster in an honorable way, kind of an honorable gangster-y way, but loyal, incredibly loyal to the people she loves and cares about, and lives by this code. Very brave as well.”

And that gangster bravery can most likely be traced back to a hardscrabble childhood of prostitution that came courtesy of Lydia, played with a chilling hardness by Manville, who is almost unrecognizable in 18th-century dress and pasty white makeup.

“Somehow or other, Lydia was her guardian,” Manville explains, “but she put her out to prostitution very young and didn't treat her very well in the sort of usual ruthless way that Lydia sees people as a commodity. ... And although Sam and I had various conversations about historically what had gone on, it was kind of up to us to be creative with it but without being too finite about it because I think it is something that will be explored ...”

The series is based on “Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies,” essentially a directory of West End London prostitutes that was published annually in the late 1700s, which described everything from physical appearance to sexual specialties, mostly in complimentary terms, and which Manville calls a “fascinating read.”

“You know, sex in our culture now, unless it's movie sex, it's a very private thing and people don't really talk about it,” she said. “So it's quite shocking to have this book where things that really we think of now as being private and not having to do with anybody else were made so public.

“And nobody was moralizing about it,” she continues. “It was very open. It was a very sexually open society. It was brazen and, yeah, you could be walking around Soho and see people having sex in an alley. It wouldn't be unusual.”