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 The Virgin Queen
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The Virgin Queen
Starts on 91Èȱ¬ ONE on Sunday 22 January at 9.00pm
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Dexter Fletcher plays the Earl of Sussex
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To Dexter Fletcher, the Earl of Sussex perfectly personifies the duplicitous nature of politics in Tudor England.
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He survived unscathed through the various reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary Tudor and, despite his role in Elizabeth's interrogation in the Tower, goes on to become one of her close advisors too.
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"He was obviously fairly useful in some respects to her - otherwise she wouldn't have kept him around," muses Dexter.
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"After all, in the beginning he's very much in Mary's camp and he and Gardiner are threatening Elizabeth, trying to get her to confess her complicity in a plot to take her sister's life."
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Fortunately for Sussex, the Lord Chancellor was a much more ruthless interrogator and bore the brunt of Elizabeth's revenge, allowing Dexter's character to seamlessly switch sides.
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"By the end of the first episode he has completely realigned himself with Elizabeth," he confirms.
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"In fact, Sussex ends up being a rather close confidant of the queen in his own little way, and he spanned quite a long period of her reign."
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Certainly, as one of Elizabeth's Privy Councillors, Sussex has the ear of the Queen, but Dexter at least is aware that Elizabeth knew her own mind and he's full of admiration for the way that comes across in the drama.
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"It's another brilliant thing that [director] Coky has done – Elizabeth is surrounded by leading men, all these strong character actors are around Anne-Marie [Duff] and I think it illustrates nicely how the Queen was surrounded by these very strong men but at the same time she was smarter than all of them - to be able to control her life, and keep control of it, herself.
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"We're all trying to manipulate her, trying to get her to go our way, to do what we think is best. We have alliances and allegiances with each other, there are factions and divides, and she just rides right through the middle of it all and we fall away accordingly."
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But Sussex uses all the political wiles garnered through his experience of four monarchs to ensure that he always bounces back.
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"He must have been a fairly duplicitous kind of bloke, or extremely shrewd, to be able to align himself with the power and not get his head chopped off," mulls North Londoner Dexter, who shows no little shrewdness himself to have carved out a successful acting career from the tender age of six, when he played Diana Dors' son in a film version of Steptoe And Son.
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Parts in Bugsy Malone and the long-running children's TV series Press Gang honed his skills to the extent that he's barely been unemployed over his 30-odd years in the business, with his more recent successes including Band Of Brothers, Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels and a role in the forthcoming 91Èȱ¬ drama Hotel Babylon, alongside Tamsin Outhwaite.
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But for now, he's enjoying being the Earl of Sussex.
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"It is very interesting to play because my character is on this move and he's playing a very complex game within that. I think Sussex represents how people could swap sides and could slip through the net, and were very duplicitous and shifty – that's a great thing to play, to illustrate that, to tell that story."
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A story of intrigue, tension and suspicion, explains Dexter.
"That's the nature of the world that they lived in then – nobody really trusted anybody and I think in that environment people go slightly mad. It starts feeding on itself, almost, and the paranoia becomes self-perpetuating.
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"It was a dangerous time and the sands were constantly shifting; people had to find who to align themselves with very carefully because it wasn't even a matter of just being thrown in jail – you'd lose your head and that was it," he shudders.
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"Everything that you'd worked for your entire life – your family could lose their lands, there was plenty at stake so I think it was all fairly duplicitous, suspicious and uptight.
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"But it was an interesting time and I think that's what's exciting about this story, the whole period of history was this volatile, exciting, very new era. It was a very active, prolific time for English history – Raleigh going off, armadas attacking, people turning up with potatoes and tobacco, great plays being written, plagues – all kinds of crazy stuff happening.
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"And Elizabeth was so unique for that period. It's a bit like Thatcherism in a way, for want of a better example – but Maggie was the first woman of power in British politics to come to the forefront and make that kind of impact.
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"And who was a great queen before Elizabeth, that we know of? Who are the other great queens you can think of throughout history?
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"She made these extreme and major decisions in her life, about her life, and that still reverberates today in its own way; she is this amazing iconic figure. Everyone knows exactly who the red-headed, virgin queen is."
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