“We shot the first season last year and it’s spectacular,” writer and executive producer Michael Hirst, best known for “Vikings,” tells Variety at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival. The second season of the historical drama – set in the 10th century – is already in the works.
While “Vikings” fans will flock to see it, “it’s a new world,” he stresses.
“There has already been a follow-up to ‘Vikings,’ ‘Vikings: Valhalla,’ which I had nothing to do with. This is a new story, set 100 years later, with a completely new cast.”
In “Bloodaxe,” Hirst will explore the antics of the warrior Erik Bloodaxe, his wife Gunnhild and Egil, “a killer and a poet.”
“To me, Egil was a gift from the gods. In Iceland, he’s one of the country’s founding fathers. He’s full of contradictions, so you never quite know where he’s going to go,” enthuses Hirst.
“He can be gentle and kind, and then he’s completely brutal. In the first episode, he’s sleeping with the wives of three fishermen, who keep asking him for a new poem. When the fishermen return, they can’t kill him on the spot, because “the wives wouldn’t forgive them.’” Egil is totally fearless. You recognize he has a soul, and out of that soul comes his poetry.”
“We live in angry times, and everything is horrible, including a lot of the shows. But I’ve always loved magical realism. King Arthur, the Bible – that’s magical realism, too. You have to be very careful how you use it, though, and the audience needs to be aware that you’re emphasizing something real.”
Hirst is still very interested in power, he admits. And families.
“Everything I write is about families – even ‘Billy the Kid’.”
Now, he will depict an ageing king trying to determine which of his sons should succeed him.
“Erik is a great warrior and an extremely brave young man. Egil became famous because he was such a brilliant raider, but he’s impulsive. Then there’s Haakon, who was sent to England to be brought up by the King of Wessex. Now, he doesn’t know where his spirit lies. One time, he goes to church and tries to pray to Christ but suddenly the room is full of ravens and when he looks up, there’s Odin standing in front of him.”
The first season will focus mostly on the conflict between Erik and Haakon, he says. “And Egil is the joker in the pack.”
Hirst became a storyteller at the tender age of 10 – “I started writing little stories, and of course I was the hero in all of them” – but his real break came when he met acclaimed director Nicolas Roeg.
“I was trying to buy the rights to his film ‘Bad Timing,’ and I invented some excuse to see him. He read my short stories and invited me to his apartment, where I stayed from 8pm until 4am in the morning. Those hours changed my life completely,” he recalls.
“He said: ‘Your stories are all right, but what is it that you want, Michael?’ I’d never thought about it before, so I burst into tears.”
Roeg threw his first script out of the window, but by that time, he had already caught the bug. His unrealized script about Napoleon led to Cate Blanchett starrer “Elizabeth.”
“I didn’t want to be conventional in any way. Nic wasn’t, and he was always challenging me.”
Hirst says “Elizabeth” director Shekhar Kapur’s lack of knowledge about Queen Elizabeth proved to be a strength. “He kept asking local taxi drivers what they thought of her! This enabled us to depict her as a young woman in a really tough place, and that’s why people liked it. They could identify with her.”
“The Tudors” and “Vikings” followed, but there’s still one story he would like to make one day.
“It’s based on a book called ‘Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village,’” written by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, first published in 1975.
Set in medieval times, it explores the conflict between the local Cathar sect, viewed as heretics, and the Catholic Church.
“The Cathars believed that Jesus was just an ordinary man, and then the Inquisition came in. The book is full of interviews with the inhabitants of a small village in the Pyrenees. You get to find out about their sexual lives, their beliefs and the social structure.”
“Some of the things they did and believed in were out of this world. For example, the shepherds would take their sheep over the Pyrenees in winter, where they would meet the Dead. And they would exchange messages! There’s that magical realism again.”
“But magical realism doesn’t work unless there’s reality.”