The King Arthur story gets an elaborate, epic retelling with Sunday’s MGM+ series “The Winter King.”
Set in the 5th century Dark Ages, this “King” is based on Bernard Cornwell’s fantastical source novels and stars Scotland’s Iain De Caestecker as Arthur Pendragon.
“There’s been lots of different iterations of the legend of King Arthur. What is it about this version that can be cool and unique? And fresh?” De Caestecker, 35, asked himself initially. “As I got into the story I could instantly see that not only is it a much more human, grounded version of what we’ve seen in the Arthurian legend before, it also starts with much more of Arthur’s origin story than what we’ve seen.”
Arthur is introduced dismissively as “The son of a whore.”
“Yes, when we first meet him he’s been living under the weight of being the bastard son of the King. He spent his childhood being rejected by his father. Ultimately, he is banished by his father — unjustly and unfairly from the kingdom that he loves.
“Taking that as a starting point, we see him not only coming back from exile to Britain, he takes on the very difficult, dangerous challenge of trying to unite a deeply fractured Dark Ages-era Britain.
“On a more human, grounded level, we see Arthur as a man trying to come to terms with trauma from his past and reconcile with his childhood demons to set out from the shadow of his father to become a leader in his own right.”
De Caestecker, born and raised in Scotland, uses an English accent for Arthur. “My dad luckily is English. It’s always come to me reasonably.”
Best known for playing scientist Leo Fitz in “Agents of SHIELD” De Caestecker dubs Arthur, “Easily the most physical thing I’ve ever done. Not that I didn’t always look forward to it, because running around sword fighting on the back of horses in beautiful locations was a boyhood dream.
“But we were filming in Wales. In the middle of winter. We’d be up the hill, sometimes in the rain coming out of different directions, and it was really cold.
“Just getting yourself through those days where you were out in the midst of a storm in the middle of nowhere, that had quite a physical toll.
“Sometimes those physical elements can in a weird way really bleed into the performance. So even though it can be difficult, you yearn for them.”