Several years ago, when Florence Keith-Roach was sent a synopsis for the pilot of The Great, she was shocked. The premise wasn’t that unusual: a period drama about Empress Catherine II, tracing her arrival in the 18th-century Russian court as a naive, fresh-faced young woman for an arranged marriage to the boorish, bawdy Peter III through to the 1762 coup, which enabled her to finally seize power from her husband.
It was the tone that was unfamiliar – creator Tony McNamara, who also co-wrote the Oscar-nominated script for the 2018 film The Favourite, was doing something different, irreverent, sweary and sexy.
“The pilot for The Great had a very unusual tone that I hadn’t come across before,” Keith-Roach, who took on the role of Tatyana, the flirtatious wife of one of Peter’s allies, told the Radio Times magazine. “It was funny and wild. I loved it.”
Up to this point, she had only been offered small TV and film roles and then suddenly, she was on set with Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult.
“As former child actors, they have been on film sets their whole lives, which is great because they know how to make everyone around them comfortable.”
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Although her role in Golden Globe and Emmy-nominated The Great could be considered the actor’s big break, her career hasn’t followed a linear progression. The combination of having a dad who was a cameraman and a grandmother who introduced her to classic musicals saw her immersed in film from a young age. She wanted to be an actor, but her family were concerned about the industry’s fickle nature.
“So I went to uni to study classics and tried not to do it,” she said.
Keith-Roach attended University College London and achieved a first-class degree, which could have led to a career in academia, but the pull of the stage was unavoidable: “I did a masters in acting at the Drama Centre in London and it was amazing. It was what my brain needed to be doing. It made so much sense.”
But then she left the Drama Centre a decade ago and reality hit: “It was hard to get work, so I started to write. I was inspired by women like Lena Dunham who wrote, directed and starred in her own TV series [HBO hit Girls]. I went to the Sphinx Theatre Company in London, a brilliant feminist writer theatre group who put on lots of workshops. We talked about the lack of stories about women. I wanted to write something funny and irreverent and rude…”
Like The Great? “Exactly. But my own thing,” she added. So she wrote, directed and acted in a play about excess and sex called Love to Love to Love You, which enjoyed a sold-out run at the Edinburgh Fringe and then at the Vault Festival in London.
A second play, Eggs, a dark comedy about female friendship and fertility, opened at the Fringe in 2015 and received a rave review from the London Evening Standard, declaring Keith-Roach a “rising star of the London theatre scene”.
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Since then, she’s been on Channel 4 Drama’s screenwriting programme and written, directed and starred in award-winning short film A Family Affair that played at film festivals around the world. She is currently writing a thriller drama pilot for the BBC, which sounds like a pretty big deal, but one that she’s seemingly taking in her stride.
And once filming for The Great season 3 wraps at the end of this year, she has another film script in development that she wants to direct and act in: a reworking of the 1954 Roberto Rossellini film Journey to Italy, which she plans to turn into a comedy-drama about sisterhood.
Keith-Roach is fully aware of the issues around perception versus reality in historical dramas – even those like The Great that are positioned as satires. To avoid more pedantic viewers demanding the series carry a warning over its historical accuracy, as happened with The Crown, McNamara prefaces each episode with “an occasionally true story”.
“I read a biography of Catherine the Great as soon as I got the part of Tatyana, but you don’t particularly need to know the historical world of that period for The Great,” she explained. “Tony McNamara is playing with the reality of history. He is using the past as a way to help us understand the present.
“The show feels so relevant to now in terms of how it talks about the limitations of certain political figures…”
The Great is available on STARZPLAY via Amazon Prime Video in the UK, and on Hulu in the US. The Great Season 2 will also air on Channel 4 from Wednesday 27th July. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what’s on tonight.
This interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. The latest issue of Radio Times magazine is on sale now – subscribe now and get the next 12 issues for only £1. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey.