HBO's 'Gunpowder,' Kit Harrington chronicle grim chapter in British history
Actor Kit Harington earned global fame as Jon Snow in HBO's epic fantasy “Game of Thrones,” but he turned to a grim, real chapter out of British history for “Gunpowder,” a three-part historical thriller premiering Monday through Wednesday, Dec. 18-20, on the premium channel.
The drama recounts the events surrounding an unsuccessful plot by Catholic rebels to murder the Protestant King James I of England by blowing up the House of Lords at the opening of Parliament on Nov. 5, 1605. To the extent that Americans know of the episode, they may associate it chiefly with conspirator Guy Fawkes (Tom Cullen), but the real ringleader was Robert Catesby, an ancestor of Harington, who plays him in the miniseries.
Harington first broached the topic of dramatizing Catesby's story three years ago with his best friend Daniel West, a producing partner and one of Harington's co-stars in “Gunpowder.”
“Every schoolkid in England knows the rhyme about ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November,' and they probably know a little something about the Gunpowder Plot but not really the whole picture,” Harington says. “As far as I knew, no one had ever really explored it.”
In addition to the charismatic Cullen, joining Harington in the cast are Scots actor Peter Mullan as the Jesuit leader Father Henry Garnet, Mark Gatiss as Robert Cecil, the king's ruthless spymaster, and Liv Tyler as Anne Vaux, Catesby's cousin.
When this miniseries aired in Great Britain earlier this fall, the BBC received some viewer complaints about the level of graphic violence shown, particularly in the first night's depiction of the torture of (fictional) Lady Dorothy Dibdale (Sian Webber).
Harington concedes that some scenes are hard to watch, but the violence isn't gratuitous, he says.
“We felt the violence was essential in it, and in the very first meeting we had with the BBC, we asked, ‘How far we can we go?'” he explains. “It was really important to us to see right from the top why these men decide to do what they do. If we can't understand why they decide to commit this very violent act, we're never going to follow them through the story.
“Also, we really wanted to be as historically accurate as possible. It was a really horrible, really gruesome time when these events were happening. Nothing that we depict in the show did not happen in real life, to these people. So for both historical accuracy and for storytelling, we needed to show how violent these things were.”
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“Gunpowder”
Debuts at 9 p.m. Monday, Dec. 18, on HBO with the second and third installments airing at 9 p.m. Dec. 19 and 20