Off With His Head

After having to halt production twice due to lost funding, Mike Barker's To Kill A King finally arrived last night with a fanfare that wouldn't have looked too out of place at a royal coronation, or indeed,execution. Dougray Scott and Olivia Williams held court alongside the director, highly elated to see the film released and equally so that it turned out so well. "I hesitated over the role when I saw the script because I didn't want to be in a historical drama, the most remarkable thing about which is the costumes," Williams told Empire Online. "But then I met Mike and he's got such an extraordinary energy that I thought: 'if anyone can make this something you wouldn't' expect from a drama with pretty dresses, this is the man to do it.'" Decapitating monarchs is the order of the day for this little slice of English history as Charles I is separated from his throne and then his body when Oliver Cromwell and his friend Thomas Fairfax drive towards an English republic. Eschewing the traditional historic approach in favour of a more personal take, To Kill A King is less concerned with the politics of the day and more with the relationship between Cromwell and Fairfax, the latter being all but forgotten by classroom history books. "I wanted to lean more towards Fairfax's point of view and how his beliefs were being undermined by Cromwell, rather than focus on Cromwell himself," said Barker. "Cromwell's quite a difficult person to defend, he slaughtered so many people and essentially became king himself. He's a fucked up character whichever way you look at it. The idea of the film is that the two guys made one great man but apart they weren't either of them up to the task." "We settled on a buddy movie," agrees Scott, the man behind Fairfax himself. "We told the story through Fairfax's eyes: what he saw, the changes in the country, what went through with Cromwell, the betrayal and the heartache. This is an extraordinary, epic story that plays out in a very intimate way."