Catherine the Great, the famed Russian ruler, lived a colorful life. She overthrew her incompetent husband to take power, advocated for women’s education and equality, corresponded with Voltaire, and lived a sexually liberated lifestyle involving multiple lovers. In spite of being one of history’s most forward-thinking and multidimensional leaders, however, she is most commonly remembered for an unfortunate sexual rumor, started by her enemies, involving a horse.
“One of the great women of history has been sort of maligned until we rescue her reputation,” said Helen Mirren, who played the ruler earlier this year in HBO’s Catherine the Great. The Oscar-winning actress attributed the “fake news” rumor to Frederick the Great, whom Mirren deemed “an absolute misogynist. He was her arch enemy and he hated her because she was successful, and in many ways more successful than he was. He didn’t believe that women should be in power, and I think he was the one who perpetuated the fake news, the false stories of her sexual proclivities, which are completely untrue.”
The absurdity of this rumor is one of the reasons why Tony McNamara, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind The Favourite, became fascinated with Catherine—writing a play about her a decade ago that evolved into the sumptuous Hulu series The Great, which stars Elle Fanning as the ruler and premieres Friday.
“She’d done all of these amazing things in her life—working in education and science and the Enlightenment,” McNamara told Vanity Fair Wednesday. “But in history she was much more known for this salacious headline than for her work. It had all been reduced to ‘maybe she banged a horse.’” Despite the fact that she reigned more than 200 years ago, McNamara sees her life and legacy as being extraordinarily timely—hence her surge in zeitgeist popularity. “It seems like a very contemporary thing that someone’s life is reduced to a salacious headline, and not the depth and breadth of their [existence]—which doesn’t matter.”
Unlike HBO’s Catherine the Great—which tackled the ruler and her later-in-life romances from a more strictly factual perspective—Hulu’s The Great is a whimsical, sometimes absurdist portrait of Catherine’s early years in the Russian palace. McNamara’s series—which feels like a fusion of The Favourite and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette—adheres to the important real-life events and details he determined fascinating, while veering into absurdist fictional realms. The horse rumor comes up as a running joke that Fanning’s Catherine continually casts aside. Said McNamara, “Whenever it’s mentioned, she’s like, ‘No one’s ever going to believe that.’”
Ahead, McNamara helps fact-check some of The Great’s most tantalizing characters, plot points, and palace happenings.
Peter the Not-So-Great
The real Peter III was deeply unattractive, physically unable to consummate his relationship with Catherine for years, and immature—playing with actual military toys in bed as an adult. McNamara changed The Great’s Peter, played by Nicholas Hoult, to be a different kind of husband—still incredibly incompatible to Catherine, but slightly higher functioning.
“He’s a man-child and a guy who hasn’t really thought for himself—he just believes men should act a certain way without thinking about it. There are more leaders like that than unlike that in the world, which is probably why I slightly changed him from the original Peter, who was a much weaker kind of character,” said McNamara. He adjusted Peter “to make him a better antagonist. The fundamental thing seemed to be that he was a bad match for her.”