CNN
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Many women have portrayed the first Queen Elizabeth, who reigned for almost 45 years during the 16th and 17th centuries, and now Minnie Driver is wearing her crown.
Driver spoke with CNN in a recent interview about how she approached portraying one of England’s most consequential monarchs in the second season of the Starz series, “The Serpent Queen.”
“I had lots of conversations with Justin Haythe [executive producer] about all the different aspects we were gonna see in her. The playfulness, basically seeing her using her sexuality as power,” Driver said. “I kind of focused on the things that were going to be different about the performance rather than going back and looking at previous ones because it’s baked in, the extraordinary power that this woman had.”
It is not lost on Driver that she’s come to the role at a time when there is a lot of conversation about women in leadership.
She stars opposite Samantha Morton as Catherine de’ Medici, the queen of France, who was known as “The Serpent Queen” for her cunning and power that many thought she garnered and maintained by being ruthless. While history doesn’t confirm the female rulers ever met in person, they did correspond, and the second season of the series imagines what their relationship might have been.
Driver said she’s perfectly fine with taking creative license in the show.
“They were connected and they were friends and I think it’s kind of just a brilliant notion of entertainment, which is we are not saying this is a absolutely fact-by-fact version of what we know happened,” she said.
Instead, the actress known for performances in varied roles from “Goodwill Hunting” to “Will & Grace,” leaned into the “fabulation” of what may have been between the two royals as they led at a time when women had very few rights.
Driver wanted to nail it down to every detail, including Queen Elizabeth’s elaborate style.
“It was like three and a half hours every day to do makeup, costume, hair. It was a lot, it was a transformation,” she said. “That transformation was so key to that character and the way that she looked. Not just because historically we know that certainly in the portraits we’ve seen, she looked that way, but also because it was her facade. It was her mask. It was how she met the world.”
Meeting the world in a spotlight is a dynamic Driver has long experienced.
She laughed and counted it a compliment when the writer of this article compared her to the singer Adele in her ability to seemingly maintain a private life for periods of time in between projects.
She said she’s able to do that because of social media.
“I love social media because I can sort of feed my real life into my social media, but it’s like, on my terms,” Driver said. “So people see the surf trip that I went on with my girls, they see the bonfire we made on the beach for my kids’ birthday.”
That direct contact with her audience also has resulted in less attention from the paparazzi, she said.
“All that seems to have settled down and I wonder if it’s because we can control the narrative ourselves as people through social media,” she mused. “We can actually give a version of who we are and how we live that’s authentic. ‘Cause I think that’s what people want now. I think people value authenticity.”
That set up also allows Driver to indulge in her passions, like her podcast “Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver,” in which she speaks with “experts and trailblazers across disciplines and asks them the same seven mini questions.”
So what would Driver ask Queen Elizabeth?
“I really would have asked her what she thought the secret to how long she reigned for. Was it [Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s secretary, who firmed a spy network to protect her] who basically had created the very first secret service and killed off all the people that were trying to kill her?” Driver posed. “Was it the fact that she had a lover who no one ever knew about, who supported her through everything? I would like to know how she managed to be such a long reigning queen.”
The second season of “The Serpent Queen” streams on Starz with new episodes released on its linear channel Fridays at 8 p.m. ET.
