ANNE BOLEYN SEASON 01

For 500 years we have been drip-fed a story about Anne Boleyn: the cold-hearted scheming seductress who bewitched Henry VIII into marrying her, before sleeping with his best friend. Oh, and her own brother. But because history is written by the victors, we have never heard her side of the story.

In this groundbreaking new drama, Jodie Turner-Smith leads a diverse cast in shining a feminist light on Anne’s demise. After years of silence and suppression, we will finally hear her voice. We will take you inside her mind, follow events from her perspective, in a narrative infused with the suffocating sense of an ambitious woman trapped by the limitations of her sex…

In our series, Anne is more brilliant and visionary than the centuries of skewed historical storytelling would ever have you believe. She openly dares to see herself as the King’s equal. She sees a future in which her daughter – a female! - could rule. She refuses to fall in line. But these are dangerous attributes in the Tudor court – a competitive world riddled with misogyny and machismo …

Just weeks before her murder, Anne was one of the powerful people in the country. Henry desired her so much that he had broken away from the Catholic Church in order to make her his wife – kick-starting the Reformation. But then she was publicly beheaded on his orders. What exactly did Anne Boleyn do to provoke the powerful patriarchy? Nothing. Except to expect what should’ve always been hers: a place at the table.

Anne’s powers are also her downfall. She is always the sharpest person in the room – she thinks creatively about how to gain power and in doing so fuels the rage of the men around her. She’s not afraid of her femininity and she’s not reliant on it either. Like many women today, she feels the intense pressure to be it all: an alluring figure and a virtuous wife, a political leader and a devoted mother. Life at court is a tightrope she must walk to meet these conflicting demands and she pushes herself to her limits to achieve them. This is a story that still resonates today in a world i where women are often judged and undermined for being ‘too’ ambitious.