BBC's The Musketeers tackles refugees and returned servicemen
When British actor Tom Burke talks about “a more random, haphazard universe” he could be referring to today’s social and political reality. Or at least Game of Thrones.
What he’s actually talking about is the third and last season of The Musketeers.
“We still know who the good guys are,” says Burke, who plays Athos in the popular period action series inspired by the classic books by Alexandre Dumas. “But the baddies are everywhere and it’s hard to know just where they’re coming from sometimes.”
Baddies such as mayor of Paris, the crippled Marquis de Feron, played with wicked glee by Rupert Everett. And his henchman, Lucien Grimaud (Matthew McNulty). Yet even they almost elicit sympathy sometimes.
“These are damaged people in a world that doesn’t have clear lines,” Burke says. “It’s like the moral ambiguity you find in Shakespeare.”
In time-honoured fashion, the first episode of the new season, The Spoils of War, plunges us straight into the thick of things. It’s four years after the tumultuous events of the third season and musketeers Athos, Porthos (Howard Charles) and D’Artagnan (Luke Pasqualino) are up to their necks in blood and gore fighting the Spanish.
Meanwhile, their former comrade in arms Aramis (Santiago Cabrera), now a monk, is forced to rely on his combat skills to protect the monastery from Grimaud and his thugs. Needless to say it’s not long before the four Musketeers reunite to save the day. Maybe.
Burke, who recently graced our screens as the morally ambiguous Dolokhov in the BBC’s lavish adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, says he’s enjoyed working on the series as a whole, much of which was filmed just out of Prague to recreate the feel of 17th century Paris.
“It was always going to be a tightrope walk between maintaining the high dramatic stakes and having fun with it,” he says. “If anything, this third season might have run the risk of being some kind of parody. That’s why it was important for Athos to have an ongoing journey.
“He’s seen lots of things since the first series and he’s a different man now. Someone said to me that they missed Athos being moody all the time. Well, circumstances change people and friendships evolve. I’ve really liked the way all the characters have developed, actually.”
This third season of The Musketeers references a lot of contemporary issues such as the treatment of refugees and returned servicemen.
One of the other risks actors run when working on historical and contemporary dramas alike is delivering a performance that quickly dates.
“Whatever you’re doing in whatever period you have to make it, not necessarily relevant, but go on instinct and where your curiosity takes you,” Burke says. “That’s not necessarily what might be relevant to society at any one moment. Otherwise you just sound preachy. Go with what grabs your heart more than your head. And go for truth rather than necessarily trying to make it real.”
Since the series premiered in 2014 it’s had its detractors, who say the show’s creators have taken too many liberties with the source material.
“Right from the beginning we only ever said we’d take the characters from the books and put them into different situations,” Burke says. “Whatever we’ve done differently we’ve always tried to honour the books and the nucleus of the characters. It’s always been about ‘How can we take Dumas’ original universe and make these characters feel right?’”
The Musketeers season three starts on Thursday at 6.30pm on pay-TV channel BBC First.
