‘The Great’ Throws Genres in a Blender — and Uses That Same Approach to Casting
“The Great” Season 3 contains some titanic shifts of character — and actors — so even though AP European History has already spoiled the broad strokes of the Hulu series, spoilers ahead.
Catherine (Elle Fanning) grieves in the last five episodes of the season, leading to an eventual, equally tragic and thrilling transformation that brings her closer to becoming a great ruler with a capital-G, capital-R. But underneath the ice — metaphorically speaking, not the literal ice-covered lake into which Peter (Nicholas Hoult) falls and drowns — showrunner Tony McNamara and casting director Dixie Chassay and her team did a lot to make sure the show always felt full even with Peter gone.
Some of this happens by keeping Hoult around, playing Peter’s double Pugachev, who rabble-rouses at the behest of Archie (Adam Godley) and then starts liking all this arousal a little too much. The show also makes strategic additions to the regulars of Catherine’s court. The key with these, especially as Chassay cast them, was to find actors that brought a different energy and wouldn’t look or seem like pale shadows of Hoult’s violent, epicurean Large Adult Son of an emperor. But the casting did not have a lot of time to react to Peter’s absence.
“The most unique thing about ‘The Great’ is that we don’t get the scripts at the beginning,” Chassay told IndieWire. “So we don’t read all the scripts and then know who the characters are and what’s going to happen. The way Tony writes [is] as the show shoots, and he often adapts things to how things are going. And with characters, if he’s really into a character, he’ll bring that character back into future episodes. So it’s kind of a live process, which makes it very meaningful, I think, as a casting director. You’re living it out as it’s going, and you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
One of the beneficiaries this season of an evolving role is Marial’s (Phoebe Fox) husband Maxim (Henry Meredith), who upgrades from a punchline about being a little boy with very fancy clothes and court manners to being a little sociopath with very fancy clothes and court manners. As with a lot of McNamara characters, Maxim’s a fascinatingly heady mix of base and refined, an increasingly good marksman obsessed with shoes. “[That’s] the interesting thing about being on a show that goes from season to season is that you cast a role in Season 2, and we don’t get all the scripts, so it might be just [for] that one episode, or maybe two,” Chassay said. “[And Maxim] becomes a seemingly significant role in Season 3. He has just gone to another level, and it couldn’t have been predicted.”
A lot of the additions in Season 3 are unpredictable but designed to create a new dynamic for Catherine’s court. “Tony really wanted to resist replacing Nick. He wanted to honor the fact that this was Catherine the Great’s story, centered around this female leader and that he was always exploring that,” Chassay said. “He wants Season 3 and Season 4 to be the evolution of this girl who [comes to Russia in] an arranged marriage and becomes this great human. So the more complicated roles [to cast were] thinking about those men who were going to surround her — and in a way that wasn’t about replacing Nick.”
There aren’t many new faces in the wake of Peter’s death, but they’re definitely distinctive. There are appearances by both British (John MacMillan) and American (Ed Stoppard) ambassadors, a shifty merchant (Chuku Modu), and a demon from the past (Mark Tandy). Jacob Fortune-Lloyd plays the dashing, hyper-logical, and ever-dreaming of cannonballs General Petrov, and Damien Molony plays an astronomer who suddenly finds himself in Catherine’s orbit. What Chassay sees that unites all of them: an ability to jump genres and tones.
“You’re just looking for really good acting. That sounds like a strange thing to say, but I’ve never known it to be quite so clean. I think that we’ve always worked hard to not play into any one genre. So we take people from comedy, from drama, and kind of move those things around and try and play a bit against type,” Chassay said. “We take actors that are maybe making an upward trajectory and on that journey give them a Tony McNamara collaboration.”
Fanning and Hoult themselves are clear evidence of that, but Chassay sees it in every member of the cast on “The Great.” “I think John MacMillan is somebody who’s going to have a huge career trajectory and Chuku Modu, obviously, and Jacob Fortune-Lloyd I think is superb and really delivered, considering we’ve lost Nick — he’s moved on to the other world, literally. You have to come in as new male characters, and Jacob delivers such a sharpness,” Chassay said.
But “The Great” also has some things baked into it that makes entering Catherine’s court a little bit easier on the new guys: By this point in Season 3, the women are unambiguously in charge. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen where the women are behaving like what we’re allowed to perceive as male behavior and that’s never questioned. And most of the men are sort of gibbering wrecks and all desperate for sex, which is actually so true to life,” Chassay said. “It’s almost like a modern-day — it has the qualities of a ‘Monty Python.’”
“The Great” certainly is akin to “Monty Python” in the sense that its characters take incredibly seriously the absurd situations they find themselves in; that ability to be straight-faced about maybe being eaten by a bear, putting a monkey in every village in Russia, or anything else, is key. But what helps Chassay and her team make decisions is the actors’ abilities, each in their own way, to yank the viewer into the absurdity, too. “Tony really responds to character actors who are stars. He’s interested in character actors and then their star-ness springs out, rather than trying to fill things with stars. There’s no insecurity because there’s no need, and that’s what is so unique about ‘The Great’ and its process,” Chassay said. “It’s not trying to shine out anything or sell itself. It just quietly is brilliant.”
