Minnie Driver has confirmed she will return to playing the role of Queen Elizabeth I for The Serpent Queen spinoff, in which she had played a supporting role as the iconic British monarch.
Stepping into Deadline’s Red Sea Studio in Jeddah this week, the actress said writer-executive producer Justin Haythe was currently in development of the series (working title The Virgin Queen), which Deadline first revealed to you was in the works following the cancelation of The Serpent Queen. The new series will focus on the life of Queen Elizabeth I.
“When the conversation began around a potential spinoff – which, you know, until someone’s pointing a camera at me and shouting action, you’re not really doing anything – is the most exciting, most fantastic idea and opportunity. It’s what I want to do more than anything else,” said Driver.
She said that when she previously played the monarch in The Serpent Queen, she sent a text to either her boyfriend to say, “‘I don’t want this to end because I don’t want to stop being her.’”
Driver admitted she has been “low-key obsessed” with Queen Elizabeth I her “whole life.”
“I’ve read pretty much everything there is to read about her, looked at every painting,” she said. “The show that we really want to make is about the woman behind the crown as well as the crown and where that seeps out and who she was. There is an imagined version of who she is so I don’t know that you can never recreate what someone else has done. But when you think about women at that time, they weren’t even allowed to own property. They weren’t allowed to own anything – nothing. Not so much as a hair comb. So, for a woman to have been Queen for as long as she was, even though people were constantly trying to kill her…it’s incredible.”
When pressed about what stage the new series was at, Driver quipped, “I was hoping it would be before Christmas but soon – it will be soon.”
Driver was at the fourth edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival this week as a member of the jury and revealed she was also in the process of creating a lab for female filmmakers, writers, actors, screenwriters and producers in the region.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” she said. “I’ve watched and I’ve been in a lot of stuff. I’ve watched how things work on a set, how they don’t work, and I felt like I could share that. And in a place where women are emerging and they’re emerging at a rate of knots, particularly as artists, I thought it would be a really good idea to create some sort of collective whereby we can start reading each other’s work. We can offer up mentorship, but also creative conversations about story, narrative and the female gaze.”
Driver also touched on her latest film features The Assessment and Millers in Marriage and why she will “never get over that heartbreak” that FX’s comedy Peep Show, based on the hit UK TV show of the same name, never got made.
