AMC+ 'Anne Boleyn' Trailer Shows Us Jodie Turner-Smith's Infamous Queen

AMC+ has released the first trailer for Anne Boleyn, the buzzy period drama that generated no small bit of controversy when it aired in the U.K. on Channel 5 earlier this year. Like many series before it, the show aimed to reexamine the final five months in the life of King Henry VIII's most infamous wife, but this particular version of the tale is quite a bit different from your standard Tudor fare.

For starters, Anne Boleyn aims to treat the infamous queen's final months before her execution in 1536 as a sort of psychological thriller. In it, Anne is tormented and gaslit over things she cannot control: Namely, her inability to produce the male heir she promised the husband who had essentially broken the world (at least as far as England was concerned) to marry her. And there's also the fact that the series cast a Black woman, actress Jodie Turner-Smith, in the role of the doomed queen.

This casting choice, as you probably have already guessed, generated no small bit of controversy across the pond, despite the fact that Turner-Smith's performance was frequently cited as a highlight of a series that otherwise garnered fairly mixed reviews. (We'll have to see how American audiences react next month.) For what it's worth, the trailer itself seems to lean fairly heavily into the idea of Anne as an early proto-feminist icon, with plenty of voiceovers encouraging her daughter - the future Elizabeth I - to reject limits on who or what she can become.

Watch for yourselves below.