Season 3 of ‘The Great’ contains some titanic character changes – and actors – so even though AP European History has already screwed up the broad lines of the Hulu series, spoilers after you.
Catherine (Elle Fanning) suffers in the final five episodes of the season, leading to an eventual transformation that is equally tragic and thrilling that brings her one step closer to becoming a great ruler with a capital G and a capital R. But under the ice — metaphorically speaking, not the literally ice-covered lake that Peter (Nicholas Hoult) falls into and drowns — showrunner Tony McNamara and casting director Dixie Chassay and her team did a lot to make sure the show was always full even with Pietro gone.
Part of that is by keeping Hoult around, playing Peter’s Pugachev double, who raises the mob at Archie’s (Adam Godley) behest and then starts to enjoy all this excitement a little too much. The show also makes strategic additions to Catherine’s court regulars. The key with these, especially when Chassay cast them, was finding actors who carried a different energy and didn’t look or feel like pale shadows of a Hoult emperor’s violent, epicurean Large Adult Son. But the casting didn’t have much time to react to Peter’s absence.
“The unique thing about ‘The Great’ is that we don’t get scripts at the beginning,” Chassay told IndieWire. “So we don’t read all the scripts and then know who the characters are and what’s going to happen. The way Tony writes (is) during the filming of the show, and he often adjusts things to how things are going. And with characters, if he really likes a character, he’ll bring it back in future episodes. So it’s kind of a live process, which makes it very significant, I think, as a casting director. You are experiencing it as he is going and you don’t know what is going to happen.
One of this season’s beneficiaries of an evolving role is Marial’s (Phoebe Fox) husband, Maxim (Henry Meredith), who goes from a punchline about being a kid with very smart clothes and courtly manners to being a little sociopath with very elegant clothes and court manners. As with many of McNamara’s characters, Maxim is a charming and intoxicating mix of short and refined, an increasingly good shot obsessed with shoes. “(This is) the interesting thing about being on a show that goes from one season to the next is that you picked a role in season two, and we don’t have all the scripts, so it could just be (for) that episode, or maybe two,” Chassay said. “(And Maxim) becomes a seemingly significant role in season three. He just went to another level, and it couldn’t have been predicted.”
Many of the additions in Season 3 are unpredictable but designed to create a new dynamic for Catherine’s court. “Tony really wanted to resist replacing Nick. He wanted to honor the fact that this was Catherine the Great’s story centered around this female leader and that he always explored this,Chassay said. “She wants Season 3 and Season 4 to be the evolution of this girl who[comes to Russia in]an arranged marriage and becomes this great human. So the more complicated roles (to cast were) thinking about those men who would surround her – and in a way that wasn’t about replacing Nick.
There aren’t many new faces in the wake of Peter’s death, but they are definitely distinctive. There are appearances from British (John MacMillan) and American (Ed Stoppard) ambassadors, a shady merchant (Chuku Modu), and a demon from the past (Mark Tandy). Jacob Fortune-Lloyd plays the charming, hyperlogical and always dreamy General Petrov, and Damien Molony plays an astronomer who suddenly finds himself in Catherine’s orbit. What Chassay sees that unites them all: the ability to jump genres and tones.
“You’re just looking for really good acting. Sounds like a strange thing to say, but I’ve never seen it so clean. I think we’ve always worked hard not to play in any genre. So we take people from comedy, from drama, and kind of shift those things around and try to play against type a little bit,” Chassay said. collaboration with Tony McNamara”.
Fanning and Hoult themselves are clear evidence of this, but Chassay sees it in every member of the cast of “The Great.” “I think John MacMillan is someone who is going to have a huge career trajectory and Chuku Modu, obviously, and Jacob Fortune-Lloyd I think is superb and really delivered, considering we’ve lost Nick – he’s gone to the other world, literally. You have to come in like new male characters and Jacob delivers such sharpness,” Chassay said.
But “The Great” also has a few things in it that make entering Catherine’s court a little easier for the new guys: At this point in Season 3, the women are unequivocally in charge. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen where women behave like what we’re allowed to perceive as male behavior and that has never been questioned. And most men are kind of gibbering flotsam and all desperate for sex, which is actually so true to life,” Chassay said. “It’s almost like modern day: It has the qualities of a ‘Monty Python ‘”.
‘The Great’ is certainly similar to ‘Monty Python’ in that its characters take the absurd situations they find themselves in incredibly seriously; that ability to be blunt about being eaten by a bear, putting a monkey in every village in Russia, or whatever, is key. But what helps Chassay and his team make decisions are the ability of the actors, each in his own way, to also drag the viewer into absurdity. “Tony really responds to character actors who are stars. He’s interested in character actors and then their stardom emerges, rather than trying to stuff things with stars. There is no insecurity because there is no need, and that is what makes ‘The Great’ and the process of him unique,” Chassay said. “He’s not trying to highlight anything or sell himself. It’s just brilliant.
