Get ready for “Blood Ax”.
“We filmed season one last year and it was amazing,” writer and executive producer Michael Hirst, best known for “Vikings,” told Variety at the Monte Carlo Television Festival. A second season of the historical drama, set in the 10th century, is already in production.
“Vikings” fans will flock to see it, he insists, “but it’s a new world.”
“There was already a sequel to Vikings, Vikings: Valhalla, but I had nothing to do with it. This is a new story set 100 years in the future with a completely new cast.”
In “Bloodaxe,” Hirst explores the eccentric behavior of the warrior Eric Bloodaxe, his wife Gunnhild, and the “killer and poet” Egil.
“For me, Egil was a gift from God. In Iceland, he’s one of the founding fathers. He’s so full of contradictions that you never know where he’s going to go,” Hirst enthuses.
“He is gentle and kind, but on the other hand, he is completely cruel. In the first episode, he sleeps with three fishermen’s wives, but they keep asking for new poems. When the fishermen return, they cannot kill him on the spot because ‘their wives won’t let them’. Egil is completely fearless. You can see that he has a soul, and from that soul his poems come.”
The show will feature magic realism.
“We live in an age of anger, and everything is terrible, including a lot of shows. But I’ve always loved magical realism. King Arthur, the Bible, that’s magical realism, too. But you have to be very careful in how you use it, and the audience has to realize that you’re emphasizing something real.”
Hearst remains deeply interested in power, he admits. And family.
“Everything I write is about family, including ‘Billy the Kid.'”
This time he portrays an aging king trying to decide which of his sons should be his successor.
“Eric is a great warrior and a very brave young man. Egil became famous for being a very good raider, but he is also direct. And then there is Haakon, who was sent to England to be raised by the King of Wessex. Now he does not know where his soul is. One time he goes to church and tries to pray to Christ, but suddenly the room is filled with crows, and when he looks up he sees Odin standing before him.”
The first season will mainly focus on the conflict between Eric and Haakon, he says. “And Egil is the joker of the group.”
Hearst became a storyteller when he was 10 years old. “I started writing little stories. Of course, I was the main character in all the stories.” But his real break came when he met acclaimed director Nicolas Roeg.
“I was trying to buy the rights to his film Bad Timing, so I came up with an excuse to meet him. He read my short story and invited me to his apartment, where I stayed from 8pm until 4am in the morning. That hour completely changed my life,” he recalls.
“He said, ‘You’re all good, but Michael, what do you want to do?’ I burst into tears because I had never thought about it before.”
Rogue threw the first script out the window, but by then he had already noticed the bug. His unrealized script about Napoleon led to “Elizabeth,” starring Cate Blanchett.
“I never wanted to fit into a mold. Nick didn’t and he always challenged me.”
Hearst said “Elizabeth” director Shekhar Kapur’s lack of knowledge about Queen Elizabeth turned out to be an advantage. “He kept asking local taxi drivers what they thought of her. This allowed us to portray her as a young woman in a really tough situation. That’s why people liked it. They were able to empathize with her.”
He added: “That’s when I really became an adult.”
“The Tudors” and “Vikings” followed, but he still has one story he would like to write someday.
“It is based on the book Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, first published in 1975.”
Set in the Middle Ages, it depicts the conflict between the local Cathars, who are considered heretics, and the Catholic Church.
“The Cathars believed that Jesus was an ordinary man, but then the Inquisition moved in. This book is full of interviews with the inhabitants of small villages in the Pyrenees. You learn about their sex lives, beliefs, and social structure.”
The book “fascinated” him.
“Some of the things they did and believed were otherworldly. For example, shepherds took their sheep across the Pyrenees in winter and met the dead there. And they exchanged messages. There’s that magical realism again.”
“But magic realism doesn’t work without reality.”
