If season one of The Great, Hulu’s genre-bending retelling of Catherine the Great’s reign, skirted the lines of historical accuracy, season two abandons it with colorful fervor. In the second chapter of this “occasionally true story,” Catherine has seized control of Russia from her politically incompetent husband, Peter. Now she must determine how to enact the sweeping reforms that her court seems poised to refute.
Star Elle Fanning says the show remains committed to exploring Catherine’s errors as well as her exploits. “Yes, this is a feminist story,” Fanning tells me from the set of Hulu’s The Girl From Plainville, in which she’ll play Michelle Carter, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the infamous texting suicide case. “But we don’t want it to feel like she’s always the smartest or always the bravest person in the room, because that’s not real life.”
Show creator Tony McNamara admits that he was left searching for answers during the height of the pandemic, when shooting parts of the season as it existed in his head became logistically impossible. “We had to probably throw out a couple of planned episodes and quickly rewrite them once we realized how difficult it would be to have a lot of people to places,” McNamara says. “But I think it’s okay. Sometimes restrictions are good.”
Limitations aside, returning to set after months of lockdown proved freeing for Fanning. “I was really pumped to get to perform and see my friends. And we were in such a little bubble,” she says, “so we just could party together and experiment together. I did feel looser this season to experiment. I don’t know; I think Catherine is also turning a little bit into Peter. She is becoming more ruthless this season.”
It was important for Fanning to lean in to Catherine’s edgier persona as empress, even as she prepares for the birth of her first child. As the actor sees it, Catherine’s impending motherhood is less personally significant and more political capital. “I think it was like an annoying nuisance to Catherine,” Fanning says of the monarch’s pregnancy. “She’s like, ‘I’m trying to run this country, and then I’m freaking pregnant.’ But it does give her a timeframe. It’s like, until the baby’s born, I’m safe. I have five months to implement all the change that I want to do and make this country perfect, because once I have the baby, I could easily be overthrown and killed on that day.”
While in character, Fanning also made a conscious effort to avoid cradling her stomach. She explains, “I find in shows and stuff, when people touch the belly, it looks fake”—even though actual pregnant people do that in real life. “So I picked and choosed when for Catherine to be aware of the baby,” such as when a kick or sudden craving for dirt hit.
Then there’s the matter of Peter, played by a never-better Nicholas Hoult. Although the real Catheirne had already killed her recently-overthrown husband by the period depicted in The Great season two, the show’s take on Catherine finds herself embroiled in a relationship that threatens to topple Russia on a daily basis. Peter is now madly in love with Catherine, despite the coup she’s planned against him—and Catherine can’t bring herself to kill him, although it seems like the most obvious course of action.
“They don’t have petty scenes [together],” McNamara says of his show’s central couple. “They’re like, massive struggles about your sexual needs within the context of being a powerful woman. She’s not just like, ‘I need to get off with him.’ Even him, usually it’s not just ‘I want her.’ It’s all cast in a bigger version of ‘How good a person can I be, and is it worth changing myself for another human being?’ Also, he’s a good political mirror for her in the sense that he’s everything she doesn’t want to be.”
Fanning says that she and frequent series director Colin Bucksey referenced the fast-paced bickering between Bringing Up Baby’s Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant when staging her and Hoult’s banter, which is silenced with a shocking betrayal. After months spent angling to make Catherine fall in love with him, Peter succumbs to the allure of his mother-in-law Joanna (played by Gillian Anderson)—having sex with her against a window before she promptly, accidentally tumbles to her death.
“Look: I do love being able to cross the line and wonder where the boundaries are,” McNamara tells me of his decision to terminate Joanna in such a shocking manner. “We certainly kicked it around a bit. Like, are we going too far? Is this crazy? And we do argue about it a lot about… But I’m more like risk cap, even risk averse.” He adds, with a smile, “I never feel like we do anything just to do it for shock value.”
So, how does an actor inhabit the totally abnormal circumstances Catherine finds herself navigating by season’s end? Fanning says that she and Phoebe Fox, who plays Catherine’s trusted friend Marial, had to reshoot the scene when Catherine is alerted to Peter’s deceit. “We didn’t have the right kind of angle on it,” she remembers. “So I actually ended up being able to have a little more time on that scene for that close-up of the shock that sets in for Catherine.”
Of course, Catherine learns of Peter’s role in her mother’s death only days after admitting her love for him. “She’s finally accepted Peter, and she thinks, ‘Okay, we can be this happy family and maybe I found that true love I’ve always been seeking in my life. And she finally feels happy,” Fanning explains. “Then hearing this, her world is—yet again—turned upside down.” Catherine discovers that she can’t change Peter, just as she can’t overhaul the country he used to rule.
In the finale, Catherine and Peter deliver searing monologues about what marriage has come to signify for them. “A lot of the season was about her having a more realistic view of the world and people, and how flawed they are, and him getting past himself to actually feel for another person,” McNamara says. “He is devastated that he hurt her, and he’s never had that in his life before. So I was just trying to find two speeches that sum up all in one go, which is sort of fun when you’ve got great actors.”
Peter and Catherine give these speeches during the wedding between Marial and her 8-year-old cousin Maxim, delivering precisely the tonal dissonance we’ve come to expect from The Great. McNamara admits that this storyline was the biggest swing of the season—and born from the trope that a woman must marry a man to retain her material and social standing. “We were like, well, Marial won’t take that. She’ll game the system. And how do you game the system? Well, you get the [eligible] male who is an eight-year-old [that] she can boss around and have control over,” he says, promising a payoff should the show return for a third installment.
Season 2 concludes with Catherine stabbing a hired Peter lookalike (also played by Hoult), only to immediately realize that despite his flaws, she still loves him. Catherine and the real Peter end season 2 with an embrace and faces so haunted they look straight out of The Graduate’s final frame. “That’s what Tony said,” Fanning replies when I bring up the film. “He was like, ‘We’re going to do the Graduate ending on set.’” She adds, “I don’t know what Tony has in store if we do the third [season], but there’s no going back” for Peter and Catherine.
That final scene also marked the last day of filming for Fanning and Hoult after a strenuous nine-month shoot amidst COVID-19. “When we shot that scene, I remember I just burst into tears,” Fanning says. “I couldn’t stop crying because I was so overwhelmed by what we had accomplished. I think I felt so proud and just relieved that we got through it.”
“I get emotional about this show,” she adds. In season one, she was a lot like Catherine, gaining her own voice as she got more experience as a producer. In the second season, she felt herself “grow as an actor” even further. “I know that for the rest of my whole life, this show will mark a change in my career or just as a person, like it’s very special,” says Fanning. “I don’t know if I was expecting it to mean so much as it has meant to me.”
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