Call it a new spin on an old story.
The three-part period drama “Anne Boleyn,” premiering on AMC+ on Thursday (Dec. 9), showcases the famous doomed Queen’s story in a different way — with Jodie Turner-Smith, (“Queen and Slim”), a British actress of Jamaican descent, in the lead role.
“We wanted to make sure the world of our Tudor court didn’t look exactly like period dramas that we’d seen in the past,” series writer Eve Hedderwick Turner told The Post.
“Because it is such a well-known period of history and Anne’s story itself has been really well covered, we wanted to make sure that it felt fresh and alive and different. And also, reflective of our society today — so that hopefully we would attract new audiences who maybe didn’t see relevance in watching a story like this previously.”
Unlike other historical dramas about similar subject matter — such as Showtime’s “The Tudors” (starring Natalie Dormer as Anne) or BBC’s “Wolf Hall,” (with Claire Foy in the role) which both take holistic approaches to the time period — “Anne Boleyn” takes a closer focus on the Queen.
The show begins when she’s already in power, just a few months before she was put on trial for adultery and incest and beheaded in 1536.
“Out of so many interesting figures in the period, she’s always one that has sort of stuck out,” said Turner. “Typically, her story is characterized by quite a male gaze. And we have a sort of crude way of remembering the wives, which basically just lists them off as ‘beheaded, divorced, died.’ They’re usually reduced to a number, a very limited way of thinking about them. T
“This felt like an exciting opportunity to get under the skin of who Anne was as a woman, and as a fully fleshed out character in her own right – not a supporting character in the story of Henry VIII or [Thomas] Cromwell. And so, I just really wanted to make sure the story followed her experience of the events, so that we feel quite connected to Anne throughout, and experienced things alongside her.”
Turner said that she purposefully stayed away from other versions of the story.
“I did read Phillipa Gregory novels and stuff when I was in school. But when I took on this project, I didn’t want to feel too influenced by other retellings, or lean on their interpretations of events. I’m looking forward to watching ‘Wolf Hall.’ I’m excited about going back and having a look at those [other versions of the story], now that I’ve got mine out of my system.”
The three episodes, which also aired on Channel 5 in the UK, play out like a psychological thriller as the walls close in around Anne.
“When I realized that there were these five months that passed between her being the most powerful woman in England, to being ripped down and inevitably murdered by her husband and other powerful figures at court, that felt like a really clear, intense, sort of claustrophobic spiraling story,” said Turner.
“And we were also having lots of discussions about bringing this element of thriller to the story. With that in mind, I thought that short condensed time frame was well suited to the tone that we were after.”