The Real-Life Cutthroat Countess Julianne Moore Plays in ‘Mary & George’

Starz’s Mary & George introduces viewers to Mary and George Villiers, the 17th century’s premiere mother-son social-climbing team, played by Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine. But it is Mary who is the revelation of the series—masterminding her hot son’s path into King James’s (Tony Curran) bedroom and proxy power. To clear her family’s way toward wealth and influence, she thinks nothing of manufacturing the fall of a court favorite and forcing a 13-year-old into a socially beneficial marriage with her unstable son (George’s older brother). 

Mary’s ruthlessness served her: She went from being a widow with four children and no property to living in King James’s court as a countess and being buried at Westminster Abbey along with kings, queens, and great poets.

“[You think about] the agency and the fierceness and the intelligence to do all of those things in a society in which women had barely any legal rights, and in this power structure that’s dominated around James and his affections,” says Mary & George creator D.C. Moore of Mary’s incredible ascent. “This is an extraordinary character who’s not really talked about as an important historical figure.” Adds executive producer Liza Marshall, “To kind of retrieve her and tell her story felt so exciting.”

Starz’s illustration of Mary is inspired by Benjamin Woolley’s 2017 book, The King’s Assassin: The Fatal Affair of George Villiers and James I, in which Woolley writes that Mary has been described throughout history as “‘busy, intriguing, masculine, and dangerous,’ a ‘Jezebel’ and ‘from first to last ambitious and unscrupulous.’” Though she is the brains of her son George’s power grab, so little is known about her that she appears fleetingly in the nonfiction account.

“Mary was a historically marginal figure,” Woolley explains in a separate phone call. “I found these little traces of her in the history, and she began to surface as this fascinating character that was very much part of the story.” The author says he first came across Mary when researching King James for another book, and discovered that Mary and George were so important to the monarch that they were administering medicine and consulting on James’s treatment in his final days. 

Woolley credits Marshall for finding his book and shifting the peripheral Mary to a central figure, alongside George. “Liza seized on it as a way of bringing a fresh perspective on the story, and I thought, That’s a brilliant idea,” says Woolley, noting the cleverness and political acumen necessary to manipulate the literally deadly power dynamics at court. “There’s more creative space for a writer to write that character, and I also felt that it kind of reversed an erasure [in history] that Mary had suffered.” 

Though there’s little solid information about the actual Mary, we do know that out of her four children, she considered George to be her great hope—given that the others had mental health problems, were unreliable, or were female. “She had to do whatever she could to survive,” says Marshall. “The Jacobean world was a dog-eat-dog world. You could have your head cut off if you got on the wrong side of the king. That makes what she did even more exceptional.”

First, Mary found the money, through marriage, to send George to France, where he could be cultured and learn about dancing and fencing. She also hired a Cambridge-educated tutor, and when she was convinced he was sophisticated enough, sent him to court, where she guided her young male avatar from the shadows. Per The King’s Assassin, “For in George, Mary had her paragon: a charismatic, handsome young man, with an athletic if delicate frame…. He became the embodiment of her hopes and instrument of her ambitions.”

On the call, the Mary & George creator sidebars to talk about George for a moment: “Just to be shallow, he must’ve been really hot.” Adds Marshall, “The contemporary sources say that when he walked into a room, people would stop speaking.”

“When the Archbishop of Canterbury first saw George, he had basically an erotic dream about him and wrote about it in his diary,” says Moore. (“That night…it seemed to me that the duke of Buckingham came into bed with me; where he behaved himself with great kindness towards me,” the entry reads.) Says Marshall, “There are so many portraits of him. He was supposed to be the most handsome man that anyone had ever seen.” 

Aware of this, Mary “weaponized” her son’s looks, says Marshall, dangling George in front of James like a piece of meat. (Though James was married to Anne of Denmark, he is known for taking male lovers.) Like The Favourite, the dark comedy about court favorites starring Olivia Colman and Emma Stone, Mary & George shows how sex was traded directly for proximity to power. Given the way sex was used—and James’s history of keeping physically attractive men close to him in court—producers felt that explicit queer sex scenes were crucial to the story. Episode three, for example, opens with the blindfolded king being led into an orgy and a pile of bare male bums. Six minutes later, elsewhere in court, Mary asks her son, “How many times have you had the king?” We then see a montage of George’s sexual episodes with the monarch, indoors, outdoors, etc. as we count along with him. Before the episode’s end, George has surprise sex with an enemy in front of a roaring fire, and then, in a different scene, takes James to bed.