How The Serpent Queen Season 2 Explores the Performative Facades of Powerful Women

Samantha Morton and Minnie Driver talk playing two complicated historical women, the masks they wear, and the truth that's likely somewhere in between

By Lacy Baugher Milas  |  August 26, 2024 | 11:15am
Photo Courtesy of Starz
TV Features Starz
How The Serpent Queen Season 2 Explores the Performative Facades of Powerful Women

Starz drama The Serpent Queen follows the story of one of history’s most influential women: Catherine de Medici. But the version of her that history often prefers to remember—a witch, a murderess, a lover of poisons and dark magic—likely bears little resemblance to the woman she actually was. And she’s hardly an outlier in that regard when it comes to famous historical women. After all, more people probably remember England’s Elizabeth I for the simple act of not getting married than for most of the things she did. 

In many ways, it makes sense that the Starz drama, with its boundary-pushing ideas about female power and ambition, would bring these two women together. True, the real Catherine and Elizabeth most likely never actually met in real life, but The Serpent Queen is a show that understands sometimes good drama requires a bit of creative license when it comes to messy things like the truth. Cast as both a foil and a mirror for Catherine, this version of Elizabeth Tudor also carefully crafts an image for the benefit of those around her, playing the role of the ditzy, virginal flirt as determinedly as Catherine allows her reputation as a treacherous bitch to flourish. They’re not only wildly entertaining to watch together, but their scenes offer a compelling exploration of the way powerful women throughout history have been asked to perform for the male gaze.

“The thing that was brilliant [about their interactions] was what Justin [Haythe, series writer and showrunner] wrote was so specific that you had very clear directives for both these women,” Minnie Driver, who plays Queen Elizabeth, tells Paste when asked about how she and Morton approached creating a historical interaction that probably never happened. “Catherine very much wanted an alliance with Britain and she could leverage her son, and she had a spare in case the first one didn’t work out. Elizabeth was on a fact-finding mission to find out how Catherine de’ Medici was running France, [and] what was really going on. So she leveraged her virginity and her hand in marriage to come on a fact-finding mission.”

“To me, it was about exploring this idea of the business side of things, [between them],” Samantha Morton, who plays Catherine, adds. “It’s a game of chess and you’re not going to win every game, but you can learn from your opponent. And she’s looking at this other amazing businesswoman going, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s phenomenal!’”

According to Driver, working with Morton had a similar flavor of two experienced women coming together and recognizing each other’s abilities.

“You have these two women with very specific objectives coming together, and in a way, I always felt like that’s really what we did [in our performances],” Driver says. “Sam and I both knew exactly why we were there. And the minute you’re clear about where you’re beginning and where it’s going to end up, you can just play in the middle. And because we’ve both been doing this for such a long time, you’re playing at quite a high degree of difficulty, which is really fun when you’ve been doing it for 30 years. We had a very intense, fun time doing this because we both knew what we were doing.”

Onscreen, there’s also a certain level of mutual respect between Morton’s Catherine and Driver’s Elizabeth. Neither of the two women appears to particularly like the other, but it’s easy to see how much they have in common as female rulers in a man’s world. 

“I didn’t play it too much about rivalry or about disliking this woman,” Morton says. “It’s more like she’s running her business and I’m running mine. And what’s brilliant about the show, is that in the first season, you see Catherine strive to be good at the business. And then in Season 2, it’s all falling apart at the seams.”

The penultimate episode of The Serpent Queen’s second season sees Elizabeth finally head back to England, having dismissed offers to marry both of Catherine’s sons and abandoned the trade agreement the Medici queen was so desperate to negotiate. But before she dramatically exits stage left, Elizabeth and Catherine finally have the sort of brutal heart-to-heart most viewers had likely been hoping to see for weeks. Masks off between one another for the first time, Elizabeth owns up to the false face she often presents to the public and correctly observes that Catherine herself does the same. 

“They did what they did as men, unapologetic in their appetites,” Elizabeth tells her rival, speaking of the exploits of her wife-killing father, King Henry VIII, and the wandering eye of Catherine’s father-in-law Francis I. “You and I don’t have such luxuries. So, yes, I must pose as a virgin and you as a witch to get what we want.”

It’s a delicious bit of self-awareness of the type The Serpent Queen frequently revels in, a quiet celebration of the way all the series’ women are deliberately shaping and using their own self-images to subvert the societal and cultural roles assigned to them by men.

“We women have had to be manipulators, just by virtue of the position that was created by patriarchy,” Driver says. “Women have always had to manipulate things, to [control] powerful dynamics. And what’s so interesting is that’s a by-the-by comment, when Elizabeth says that to Catherine. I must pose as a virgin and you must pose as a witch. These are the masks that we wear. That we have to wear.”

Though this scene between the two queens is brief, it’s incredibly satisfying, if only because it’s so rare that women like this get to be honest with one another or truly seen in this way. (Even though, technically, they’re still at odds.)

“More in Season 2 than in Season 1, you do see behind the mask, you do see the vulnerabilities of Catherine, you do see it coming apart [around her],” Driver says. “You do see where it’s fraying, and that is very interesting, emotionally. With Elizabeth, you see it fractionally less, but it’s there. And it’s really only there in the scene with Catherine at the end, where you do see that kind of revelation: Look, love. I’m a brand and you’re a brand. Let’s get on with it.”

The Serpent Queen has always depicted Catherine as hyper-aware of her image, a woman who purposefully shapes the way she’s viewed in the world. It’s most evident, perhaps, in the series’ first season, as she tells a version of her life story to a rapt Rahima. Without that framing, Season 2 relies more heavily on Catherine’s fourth-wall-breaking asides to the audience, and perhaps that is the reason the lines between the Serpent Queen and the real Catherine de Medici feel so much more starkly drawn in this run of episodes.

“I think everybody [wears a mask] in society. And as an actor, our job is to find the moments where the mask is on and where it’s off [for our characters],” Morton says. “We might behave differently with our children, or our lover, or our bank manager, with the police officer who stops us on the street, but that’s part of being human beings, isn’t it? But when you’re in a position of power—and I was thinking the other day about very, very, very powerful oligarchs or musicians or actors of a certain level and the people they have around them—who do you trust when everybody wants to be your friend or on your payroll? Who do you take the mask off with? So for me, when I was playing Catherine, my inspiration for the breaking of the mask, if you like, was talking directly to the camera.”

For Morton, who wanted to avoid the confessional or overly emotional style that such narrative choices often imply, Catherine’s breaking of the fourth wall had a very specific—and explicitly male—inspiration. 

“When I was meeting for the role and talking about my interpretation [of Catherine], I talked about Ray Liotta in Goodfellas,” she says. “The idea of [The Serpent Queen] as kind of a gangster movie. [Liotta] breaks the fourth wall at the end of Scorcese’s film to stand up and say, ‘No, let me tell you what’s actually going on now.’ I knew that Fleabag had done it recently, but I wanted to do something different, something opposed to the vulnerable ‘these are my innermost thoughts, now what do I do’ thing.”

Instead, Catherine breaks the fourth wall as a display of power. Whether she’s complaining, mocking, or just offering catty observations about those around her, her asides to the audience never indicate anything other than a woman who is fully aware of and in control of her choices, even when her plans don’t necessarily go the way she intended.

“[Season 1 asks] what would you do? How would you do it differently?” Morton says. “It questions the morality all the time. And certainly, Season 2 ramps that right up—everybody has a moral dilemma and a decision that maybe we don’t like [to make]. Elizabeth and Catherine in the show, we appear to do pretty awful things, but we have no choice. Men have been doing awful things for forever and it kind of gets forgotten quickly and then we repeat the same mistakes in history.”

“It’s a different metric,” Driver agrees. “That was a template that was created by men, by the [same kinds of] men that control Catherine de Medici’s life. And there’s something really interesting about the fact that both these women understand they’re being held to a different level of accountability.” 

The Serpent Queen has always been forthright about society’s longstanding unease with women in positions of power, though its second season is more interested in the emotional toll holding on to those roles takes. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and all that.

“Look at Elizabeth’s father, he cut her mother’s head off when she was two years old. You grow up living with that, with multiple attempts on your life, it’s a different set of considerations. It’s survival,” Driver says. “I’m endlessly fascinated by what’s behind the masks of these women, but also completely understanding of [who they were] and why they felt they had to do the stuff that they did.”

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.

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