Actors were stretched to the limits for their roles in new BBC1 show The Musketeers.
If it looks like the stars of the BBC’s big new drama The Musketeers could really live in the period, you’re not far wrong. All the stops were pulled out to make the drama as authentic as possible.
And that meant Santiago Cabrera and Tom Burke, who play Aramis and Athos respectively, getting down and dirty, sweaty and bloody.
Santiago had plenty of sword- fighting experience as Lancelot in the BBC’s Saturday-night favourite Merlin. But he says this was on a totally different level.
“I’d never done it with such a hands-on teacher who knew exactly what the Musketeers would have been doing,” Santiago, also known for major American series Heroes and Dexter, told The Weekly News.
“In fact, we all went through a bootcamp which was really intense and demanding. We’d get up at 6am and be in the stables cleaning the horses, so we knew the reality of it.
“Rather than just watch, we really carried things through. It was all a bit of a blur of horse riding, sword fighting and stunts. We were constantly training for the next fight.”
The Musketeers is the latest big budget take on the famously swashbuckling characters created by Alexandre Dumas. The bond between the Musketeers D’Artagnan and Porthos are also wielding swords is supposed to be unbreakable and the pair admit that six months together for shooting brought that about for real.
“A lot of the banter we had on set really added to our relationship,” says Tom, known for period dramas like Great Expectations and more recently the drama The Hour and comedy series Heading Out.
“It was an incredible amount of fun and I feel very lucky to be asked to get dressed up and play it. The more fighting we did the more we enjoyed it.
“It was a long shoot but it seemed to go incredibly quickly and it wasn’t a drag at all. You’d be on horseback seeing a beautiful sunrise and it was such a great feeling.”
The duo say that every effort was made to roll the clock back to mid-19th century France.
“We shot it in Prague and a huge amount of work had been done in recreating the period before we arrived,” explains Tom.
“We had an extensive etiquette workshop down to details like how to drink from a certain glass or whether or not to bow.
“But we’ve tried to do it in a way that doesn’t feel alien to people watching it. You don’t want to get too entrenched in some period style. It’s still very much a family show.”
New Doctor Who Peter Capaldi is the baddie of the piece. Peter, who showed he’d be using his native Scots accent in the Christmas special of Doctor Who, takes the part of the scheming Cardinal Richelieu.
He sees himself as bringing order to an outlaw society and having to take on the responsibilities of government for the weak King. To the musketeers, though, he’s the villain, a power-hungry dictator after nothing less than the complete control of France.
“We all hope we might get a chance to do more if people like it,” adds Tom.
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