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This weekend, director Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite hits theaters, and the good news is it’s one of the very best films of the year. Starring Olivia Colman as Queen Anne, the early 18th century English monarch whose reign was beset by injury and illness and miscarriages but for whom the palace intrigue was eyebrow-raising. The Favorute depicts the relationship between Anne and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) , as one of fraught devotion and desire, and when an interloper enters the picture in the form of Emma Stone’s tenacious Abigail Hill, the intrigue gets even more delicious. It’s one of the funniest and sharpest films of the year.
One of the things that makes The Favourite so irresistible is that movies about horny royalty are almost always a good time. It’s a blast to watch all-powerful royalty get led around by their hormonal urges the same as everybody else. It can be the great unifier. Many portly, horny man has looked upon portraits of Henry VIII and heard tales of his many wives and thought “I could do that.” (That is, until the movies go and cast hunks like Eric Bana and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in the role and suddenly the fantasy gets a bit steeper.)
The following eight movies and one TV series are among the most watchable (even when some of them are bad) depictions of randy royalty that you can stream today.
'Excalibur' (1981)
Director: John Boorman
Royals in Question: King Arthur (Nigel Terry), Queen Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi), and Sir Lancelor (Nicholas Clay)
Other Royals in Question: Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne) and Lady Igraine (Katrine Boorman)
Here at Decider, we’ve been having a lot of fun with the extreme sex-forwardness of director John Boorman’s Arthurian epic Excalibur lately, though we’ve mostly been focusing on the (deleted) scene of Helen Mirren and Liam Neeson as Morgana Le Fay and Sir Gawain. But the Arthurian legend is so much more focused on the royals and how their wayward biological urges built and then tore down kingdoms. The Uther/Igraine encounter is what brings Arthur into this world, and naturally the Arthur/Guenevere/Lancelot love triangle is pretty much the most famous of all romantic entanglements.
'Dangerous Liaisons' (1988)
Director: Stephen Frears
Royals in Question: The Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich)
The sexy games of the bored French aristocracy are the subject of Christopher Hampton’s dishy play, which was itself adapted from a 1782 novel, and which would later be re-imagined as a teen soap for the WB generation in Cruel Intentions, so honestly, let’s all give it up for Dangerous Liaisons as the reigning champion of timeless storytelling. Or at least timeless storytelling about a Marquise and a Vicomte whose desires for conquest and revenge — and their utter lack of morals — have them devise an elaborate and cruel sex scheme.
'Queen Margot' (1994)
Director: Patrice Chéreau
Royals in Question: Margaret of Valois (Isabelle Adjani) and Henri de Bourbon (Daniel Auteuil)
The schemes and plotting of the famed Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi) are the subject of this film, which took the Best Actress award for Lisi at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, the same one where Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or. Catherine’s plot to marry her daughter, the titular Margot, off to the future Henry IV, are complicated by Margot’s passionate affair with a soldier, played by the smoldering Vincent Perez. This is all set against the backdrop of the 16th Century French conflict between the Catholics and the Huguenots, so it’s nothing but sex and violence and Frenchness, it’s great.
'Hamlet' (1996)
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Royals in Question: Queen Gertrude (Julie Christie), King Claudius (Derek Jacobi), Prince Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh)
Branagh’s opulent, massive, epic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a massive 4 hours long and played with an intermission when it screened (in 70mm) in theaters. And while Branagh’s Hamlet and Kate Winslet’s Ophelia have the film’s big sex scene, it’s the covetous Claudius who sets this whole gory story into motion, poisoning his brother, the King, so he can inherit the throne and marry Queen Gertrude. Shakespeare knew as well as anyone that horny royals be crazy.
'Marie-Antoinette' (2006)
Director: Sofia Coppola
Royals in Question: Queen Marie-Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) and King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman)
Coppola’s follow-up to her huge success with Lost in Translation was a polarizing portrait of the famed (and famously executed) French monarch Marie-Antoinette as a girl caught up in the luxuries of palace life at Versaille. It’s a film drowning in candy-colored sweets and clothes and drinks and parties, all set to an anachronistic ’80s soundtrack. One of the film’s funnier undercurrents, though, concerns the lack of sexual compatibility between the queen and King Louis XVI, whose attempts at lovemaking are so awkward, they need to eventually get him a tutor.
'Elizabeth: The Golden Age'
Director: Shekhar Kapur
Royals in Question: Queen Elizabeth I (Cate Blanchett), Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen)
Queen Elizabeth never let anything so meager as being the Virgin Queen hold her back from getting mixed up in the sexual shenanigans going on all around her. After being attracted to dashing explorer Walter Raleigh in court, Elizabeth is drawn to him, but he ends up tumbling into bed with Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting, Bess (Abbie Cornish). And as a result, the Spanish are able to engage in some psychological warfare when they spread rumors about Elizabeth and Raleigh carrying on a sexual relationship. That gets Elizabeth mad, and you wouldn’t like her when she’s mad.
'The Tudors' (2007-2010)
Royals in Question: King Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer)
While in many ways, The Tudors was a four-season tracking of King Henry VIII from the chiseled cheekbones of Jonathan Rhys Meyers to someone who might even remotely resemble the more rotund images of Henry that we’d been used to. No matter, though, since our newer, sexier Henry VIII meant torried woodland sex scenes with a randy (though strategic) Anne Boleyn. After two seasons, it was off with Anne’s head, though Henry still had four more wives to dispatch.
'The Other Boleyn Girl' (2008)
Director: Justin Chadwick
Royals in Question: King Henry VIII (Eric Bana), Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman), Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson)
It was a very Henry-curious time in pop culture, apparently, as both The Tudors and this novel adaptation dared to ask the question: What if Henry VIII was secretly a massive babe? The answer, in both, is that he’d still be a jerk, but this way we get to look forward to the sex scenes. In The Other Boleyn Girl, Henry ends up married to the scheming Anne, but it’s the sweeter, more reticent Mary who he seems to love. Doesn’t that just figure.
'Anna Karenina' (2012)
Director: Joe Wright
Royals in Question: Princess Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley), Count Alexei Karenin (Jude Law), Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson)
Joe Wright’s ambitious and imaginative staging (literal staging, like entirely on soundstages) of Tolstoy’s famous and fatalistic novel really invests in the uncontrollable passion between Anna and Vronsky, a passion that leads Anna down a road to divorce from her husband, Jude Law, and ultimately ends up beneath the wheels of a train. It is all INCREDIBLY dramatic.
