Ah, Mark Antony, where have you gone? Shakespeare's muscular creation, the murdered tyrant's friend who whips the mob into a frenzy by showing them "sweet Caesar's wounds," is no more. At least not in HBO's version of Rome.
Instead we get a rather more louche creature, who not long after Caesar's death, reclines in bed and refuses to leave until . . . well, until his needs are met. Fine, says his long-suffering paramour, unwilling to do the job herself. "Fetch that German slut from the kitchen."
James Purefoy, the British actor charged with the lip-smacking task of bringing Antony to life, smiles at the memory of it. "The language is, shall we say, salty. Thank God we've got companies like HBO that aren't worried about using the language people used."
When the second and final season of HBO's Emmy-winning series hits the air tomorrow night, the air will indeed be blue (it is broadcast on The Movie Network in Eastern Canada and Movie Central in the West). There is little high-brow posturing from the show's creators, who have given the show its tagline: "Sex. Power. Revenge."
The revenge will be familiar to any student of history. The first season ended with the murder of Caesar (Ciaran Hinds) on the floor of the senate. The second season resumes immediately after, with various factions, led by Brutus, Antony, and the future emperor Octavian all jockeying for power (and with the orator announcing that "prostitutes, actors, and unclean tradesmen" will not be welcome at Caesar's funeral).
Antony continues to be a vulgar, sex-mad hothead -- not exactly the characterization we got from Brando or Burton, but accurate nonetheless, according to Purefoy. "As soon as you do the research, you find a different man," he says. "Not only was he a big drinker, he was a man who lived life at a thousand miles an hour . . . it's like watching a meteor across the sky. You know it's going to crash and burn, but my God it's exciting to watch."
To describe Antony's behaviour as "amoral" is to view the culture through a 21st-century lens -- to be "morally retrospective," as Purefoy says. The first season of Rome was criticized for its heavy doses of sex and violence -- it was temporarily yanked off the air in Australia -- and it's not like a pink cloud settles over the Coliseum in season two. There are enough scenes of torture and murder in the first four episodes to make Tony Soprano shake his head. "The larger thing about Roman culture in general, is that it is basically us without the bonds of Judeo-Christian morality on top," says writer and producer Bruno Heller. "So it is us, unleashed, the Western mind unfettered or unrepressed."
Heller and several members of the largely British cast have landed in London to talk about the show. It's a cool break from the city of Rome, where the series was shot on a huge, five-acre set constructed at the famed Cinecitta studios, and where temperatures were so hot that actor Simon Woods' costume one day melted. "I was getting on and off my horse -- very badly -- and suddenly I heard plink, plink," said Woods, who plays Octavian , "and all my tassels had fallen off."
Quite apart from the cost of keeping the cast and hundreds of extras cool, the series is phenomenally expensive, with HBO shelling out about $11-million (U.S.) per episode, which may be why it's ending after two seasons. This year, says Heller, the big splash on screen will be the Battle of Philippi, which called for 1,000 extras. "Philippi is about the death of Brutus and Cassius, and the death of friends and the death of the last hopes for the old school Republic."
For the hard-core "Rome anoraks," as Heller calls the people obsessed with history, the battle scenes will be a feast. The more general audience, however, is likely to be equally involved in the continuing cat fight between Rome's two most powerful and devious matriarchs, Servilia (played by noted stage actress Lindsay Duncan) and Atia (Polly Walker, who practically purrs her lines.) "I'm not quite sure why audiences like to see women not getting along," sighs Duncan.
Atia and Servilia are given some of the best lines of dialogue in the series, most of it too bawdy to be reprinted here. "Mark Antony buggers boys like you for a snack," Atia snaps at her son at one point.
Speaking of Antony, his love affair with Cleopatra and sad denouement -- "like a sagging balloon," says Purefoy -- are played as tragedy. Even at the end, though, he gets the ripest lines. Surveying an orgy in Rome's darkest days, he says to Cleopatra, "Look around us, love. All we have left is whores, lickspittles and hermaphrodites."