Explorer, trader and inventor of swimming pool and hide-and-seek games, Italian adventurer Marco Polo is the subject of a new TV miniseries that charts his 13th century exploits. The show lands on Netflix on December 12, and, like a merchant laying their spicy wares at our feet, it has some first-look stills revealing the Oriental treasures in store. Click on the photos for a closer look. The Venetian, whose permanent gap year took him as far as China and was recounted in his epic travelogue The Travels Of Marco Polo, is played by newcomer Lorenzo Richelmy. The ten-part series, produced for the on-demand service by Harvey Weinstein and company, will see his traveller discovering that the intriguing and betrayals of Kublai Khan’s court is even more fiddly to negotiate than whatever A-road connects Venice with Ancient Mongolia.
Joining Richelmy are Zhu Zhu (Cloud Atlas’s Megan Sixsmith) as alluring siren Kokachin, Benedict Wong as Khan and Twin Peaks’ Joan Chen as his empress.
Kon-Tiki co-directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg have directed the first two episodes from scripts penned by show creator John Fusco. His previous screenplays for Young Guns, Young Guns II, Thunderheart and Hidalgo, among others, have had a distinct Western flavour. Marco Polo's December air date is the time to find out whether he's translated any of that into a genre-mash of yak stampedes and Mongolian stand-offs.