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Starz is known for its steamy shows, but the first big sex scene on The White Princess wasn’t exactly romantic. The show, which is based on Philippa Gregory’s historical fiction, had to tackle King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York’s problematic first time. The two royals are supposed to wed to unite their fractured kingdom, but Henry’s mother wants him to test Elizabeth’s fertility first — outside of marriage and against Elizabeth’s wishes.
The scene winds up being a brutal exploration of power. Henry starts with the upper hand but it soon seesaws back-and-forth between him and Elizabeth, or Lizzie. Finally, she takes command of the situation and bullies him into the quick consummation. The scene is a tightrope walk of tension and actors Jodie Comer and Jacob Collins-Levy play it as a furious game of tit-for-tat. The two actors told us that it was tricky bringing the scene to life.
“We wanted to give Lizzie as much control as she could possibly take,” Comer said. “We shot that scene twice, actually, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, the first time it did read in a way that would have made it harder for the audience to forgive him for it,” said Collins-Levy, “so the director kind of looked at it and said, ‘Let’s do it in another way.’ There’s a slight shift in the dynamic that makes it more slightly more ambiguous.”
Showrunner Emma Frost explained to me that she took pains to turn the moment away from the horrifying rape scene that Gregory wrote and into a chance for Elizabeth to assert what little power she had. “In the novel it is a rape scene. Henry rapes Lizzie. It’s hard to read, a painful scene,” Frost told me. “And I asked Philippa about the scene and she said, ‘What history tells us is that eight months after Lizzy and Henry were married, Lizzy gave birth to their first child. So, unless it was wildly premature, they had sex before being married.’ It’s something that’s hard to imagine from a moral standpoint quite aside from the fact that they didn’t like each other.”
“So, Phillipa made her own completely legitimate choice. That is how she wanted it portrayed in the novel. I had a different response, the show is a love story.” Frost continued, “Lizzie and Henry, as we know, were in love with each other. I do not believe a man can rape a woman and she can fall in love with him so that wasn’t something I wanted to do, so I made a different choice to Phillipa’s choice. And there were two options. One of those was to sidestep that all together and ignore the fact that in history she gives birth eight months later, play that they get married then they have sex but A, what’s interesting about that? B, that’s cowardly for me because women are subjected to rape, sexual assault.”
“Rape is about power. Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power. So, what I wanted to look at that is in what were ways could Lizzy refuse him any power at all and so for me what happens in that scene, and it was very conscious, it flips and he comes away from it feeling more raped than she does. He’s humiliated, he’s absolutely made to feel that small and what happens in the scene is that he kind of blunders into it…There’s a very clear point for me and in the writing of the scene where she pushed him away, he doesn’t try to come back. He stands at the other side of the room, she’s shoved him away and at that point he’s not going to do it,” Frost said. “And in that moment she decides to take control of it. She only has that one moment where she will be able to. So, what she does is, she goes for him. She uses every weapon in her arsenal to humiliate him, to emasculate him, and to take away any molecule of power he could possibly have. So, she ridicules him for doing what his mom says, she basically says, ‘I can’t even feel your penis, really is that supposed to upset me?’ He comes away feeling reduced to a figure of fun, he’s absolutely humiliated by what happens. So, what I wanted to do very much is to show a way that a woman does have some power in that situation.”
The White Princess will follow Elizabeth on her own personal path to power. She will have to figure out where her loyalties are: with her mother or her new husband.
