Get Your First Look at the Cast of Starz Period Drama 'Becoming Elizabeth'
Premium cable network Starz has released the first look at its upcoming period drama Becoming Elizabeth, an eight-episode series that aims to explore an oft-ignored aspect of the famous Elizabeth Tudor's life: Her youth.
The daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth saw her mother beheaded when she was just two years old. Though her parents' marriage was annulled and she was declared illegitimate, Elizabeth spent most of her childhood being alternately welcomed to and banished from court, living in a variety of royal houses and meeting what must have seemed like an endless stream of stepmothers.
The death of King Henry VIII sets into motion a dangerous scramble for power. His surviving children find themselves pawns in a game between the great families of England and the powers of Europe who vie for control of the country. Elizabeth watched warring factions struggle to claim influence over her sickly younger brother, King Edward VI, and found herself embroiled in a variety of schemes and intrigues in an attempt to secure her own place in the royal succession. Her sister, Queen Mary, even threw her in the Tower of London at one point as a result of her plotting, but the extent to which she was personally involved in any threat to either of her siblings' reigns is largely unclear and often depends on what history you read. (And how a particular historian may or may not have felt about Elizabeth when they were writing.)
German actress Alicia Von Rittberg was tapped to play the young Elizabeth late last year, but this is our first information about who would be joining her in the series. And the cast is full of faces that will be familiar to Anglophiles everywhere.
Watch Von Rittberg and several of these other new cast members give a behind-the-scenes introduction to the show below.
