Cursed's Katherine Langford says it's time for an Arthurian origin story from a woman's perspective
TV Features Cursed
In Netflix’s new original series Cursed, Knives Out alum Katherine Langford is Nimue, better known to some throughout the course of history as The Lady of The Lake. A Fae summoner who is tasked with delivering the Devil’s Tooth (think: the sword that eventually lands in the stone) to Merlin, Nimue is the courageous driving force behind Cursed, which was originally conceived as a YA book. The A.V. Club talked to Langford about why it’s about damn time Nimue got a little screen time, and where she thinks the youngster’s fierce determination comes from.
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Yeah, but as with all things, it still needs to be good. Cursed was just boring and dull.
1) So… The Mists of Avalon?2) How about no more Arthurian origin stories? Merlin, that Camelot show, Legend of the Sword, The Kid Who Would be King… all we get are origin stories.
Honestly, how can you forget the best Arthurian origin story of them all: Stargate SG-1?
Yeah, there is a huge canon, and we get the beginning (kind of, cause they often skip a bunch of stuff with Arthur’s parentage that is kind of really important) but we almost never actually see Arthur’s court, or its fall. A really good series going from beginning to end, with some grounded characters and world building (so the many fucking bonkers fantastical aspects feel as otherworldly as possible) would be grand. If you could get the production value of say Vikings, or (dream of dreams) Game of Thrones, and the writing of something like Deadwood (in how it takes characters apart, shows you their aching humanity, and puts them back together in such a way you love them) it might be something really incredible.I don’t know why this has never been done well, but it often feels like a tone problem, and one of intent behind adapting the story. For whatever reason the angles people come at this from is rarely successful.
Or maybe we just let the Arthurian mythos take a break for a while, maybe heal up that ACL while we explore lesser trod historical fantasy fiction.
Sure, probably have to for something like I’d like to get made. I’d also really dig a well done Troy series, that was in it for the long haul, and was willing to have it be super weird and have the heroes be morally very alien (they get up to some shit that is just not justifiable at all by our standards).Or Gilgamesh! Why has no one touched Gilgamesh? That shit is nuts. Or As Frank Walker Barr mentioned, Charlemagne, there’s a ton of drama that could come out of a series based on that. You could literally adapt any of the Indian pantheon’s myth cycles, and it would be the most bonkers and violent thing anyone had seen on tv, though you’d have to tread carefully or you’d piss off a lot of people. What stories would you like to see get made?
You had me at the Troy TV series. Even with the pre-determined ending, you could still get 4 or 5 solid seasons out of it with plenty of wiggle room to do some non-canon stuff.And while this would probably work better as a movie, I’d love to see the first Death Dealer book done right. For those who don’t know, imagine Conan by way of Max Rockatansky, with just enough magic to keep things interesting but not overwhelm the story.
Oh man, a good Troy series would be killer, there’s been so many bad ones though. I feel like they go too high fantasy and prosaic with it. The thing about the Trojan war is how it’s incredibly earthy and bloody, but there’s also gods and shit interfering. The contrast between mythic nobility, and people being bloodily stabbed in the groin, then dying noisily over three days, is what makes it so enduring. It’s like an Iraq war drama, but there’s a magical proxy war driving all the action. Though I’ve seen a comic take that really grabs it from a historic angle, and yet because of the beliefs of the characters it feels incredibly mythic, so you can do it low magic as well.That sounds wicked, I’m all for more good fantasy, historical or otherwise. It boggles the mind that the Conan aesthetic hasn’t been able to be captured since the original film (and even that was a slightly different beast, though it got the tone right). Like how have they not been able to do Conan right for 30 years, let alone the lesser known guys. Road warrior but fantasy, is totally my jam.
Athurian lore is kinda weird in that the “Golden Age of Camelot” lasts less than the reign of one monarch. Makes one wonder what makes him so damn special to begin with… :PAlso, the early 2000s Mists of Avalon miniseries is great.
Well, that’s kind of the case of the real life Arthurian model of Charlemagne, isn’t it?
More or less. Though the real difference is Charlemagne had heirs, they just split everything up, and hated each other, and eventually it all (mostly) came back to one ruler. I think the real reason it has such staying power is it’s a tragedy, Camelot falls, and so is idealized as the possibility of a unified kingdom, which is something that wouldn’t be actually seen in England for centuries after that. It’d be like if America had actually completely fallen apart (like everyone said it would) and become a bunch of individual countries after Washington died. There’d be legends of what could have been to this day.
There is a Green Knight movie coming out, whenever movies start coming out again.
Which I am very eager to see, it looks trippy as all get out, and I dig me some trippy fantasy.
Seriously, my first thought was like “damn, no respect for Marion Zimmer Bradley, huh?”Although I guess with cancel culture being what it is, and the recent accusations, maybe she isn’t the best person to throw out for female empowerment.
I have a lot of issues with cancel culture – but considering that the accusations against MZB and her husband were proven categorically true – that her being persona non grata is completely for the best.
She should definitely be persona non-grata forever, but that doesn’t mean her work didn’t exist. You can easily say, ”It’s great to have a woman centered work that isn’t from a complete monster.” or “There’s room for more than one Arthurian take that has a female central character.” If we get fifty versions centered on men (may of which I love!), we can have more centered on women. You don;t have to be the first and only to be worthwhile.
Well… recent being six years ago.
And no matter how one feels about cancel culture and the potential for false accusations, I think we can make some exceptions for child molestation and agree that being accused of that is beyond the pale…
She was a pedophile who ruined her kid’s childhood, not some white instagram model who dressed up as Pocohontas at a frat party. Bradley deserved far worse than what she got.
Came for this. Loved The Mists of Avalon.
Yes, seems to me The Mists of Avalon is a) pretty well known, and b) pretty female-centered.
I’d hazard that MZB is a non-mention because it has been revealed she and her second husband (Walter Breen) sexually abused their own children for years. Their children came forward with the truth several years ago.She also deliberately turned a blind eye to Breen’s active predation and molestation of other children at various Sci-Fi & Fantasy conventions he or they attended. It was revealed via depositions that were released to the public – she admitted to being well aware of his actions.I’ve always been surprised at the lack of press regarding it all – there still seems to be a fair amount of MZB fans whom are still unaware of the horror-show she willfully articipated in.
MZB should obviously be canceled. But that doesn’t mean the fans who enjoyed her work should be treated as if their experiences don’t exist, or don’t count.
Well, Mists of Avalon was from 1983. So there’s no reason Katherine Langford, who was born 13 years later, would know if it or have read it.And, as other posters have said, probably not a good time to option the film and give MZ Bradley some money, even posthumously…
Hogwash; I’m sure she’s heard of it. And it makes sense for her, as a promoter of the series, not to mention it, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of reporting from The AV Club.And that 2011 Camelot series was based more around Eva Green’s character than any of the men, so the early 2000s Mists of Avalon series isn’t even the most recent female-centric Arthurian screen media.
Maybe. Langford would have been 17-18 when MZB was outed as a child molester and the book became less vogue. It’s very possible she hadn’t read it.
And she would have 15 when Camelot aired, so that could have easily been missed.
Well sure, but there’s a huge difference between having merely heard of a book with a similar premise to your own new series, and having read it. 😉
Sure. But similarly, there’s a big difference between knowing there’s a book called Mists of Avalon that’s about King Arthur and knowing it’s told almost exclusively from female points of view.
(I’d seen the book store for years and years—probably a decade—but never
tried getting a copy until I was 21-ish, and never knew its perspective
prior. And I only learned that by talking to someone who loved the book.)
And if you’re not a reader (or don’t read fantasy) even knowing of said 35+year-old book might be tricky. And even if you are a fantasy reader, you might be drawn more to books written in this century. There’s no shortage of amazing fantasy written farm more recently than the early ‘80s.
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All this I agree with. It’s easier to know things than ever before, but not everything turns into common knowledge. I kinda think the show’s staff should be prepped that this is a topic that was probably going to come up, but I imagine Cursed is also for a general audience rather than a genre audience. And actors certainly may not engage in a work beyond the project in front of them, even though audiences and press-junkets demand that they be fans as well since forever.
That’s why I’m pretty interested in A24’s upcoming “The Green Knight.”
At this point an Arthurian show or movie that is a direct adaption of the Malory or White would be more original than all these reinterpretations.
Monarchies are just despotic tyrannies. The guy with the most power proclaims he now owns everyone and everything in the country because of some concocted ‘divine right’ from one fictional superbeing or another. If you disagree you’re branded a ‘traitor’ and you’re murdered.
Errrm… no. Not at all. Try not to get your knowledge about history from pure entertainment.
In what way isn’t that true? Granted, perhaps democracy would have been infeasible before widespread literacy, but basically there really wasn’t any difference between “fascist dictatorship” and “absolute monarchy”. And yet we seem to have a weird nostalgia thing in fantasy for monarchs.
“absolute monarchy” was a fairly modern manifestation and the exception, not the rule. Monarchy has existed for thousands of years before its absolute form in much more complex forms some of which even included forms of voting and/or mutualized relationships in which the different levels of hierarchy each had their own duties towards the other.
To the point where some leaders could ride the fence between theoretically higher placed leaders because neither of the latter could afford to completely lose the subsidiary to the other. If “monarchy” to you is only absolute monarchy, you haven’t understood the complexity of monarchy.
“Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!”
(I’d have been so disappointed not to see at least one of these.) Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!
Divine right of kings is actually a very brief chapter in the European history; it started around the 16th or 17th century and ended in the 18th. It was a transitory period between feudalism and civil government, when power was being consolidated from aristocracy to a centralised system.
The very earliest kings that existed (in Sumeria) were priests who ruled supposedly at the will of their gods. Same thing for Egyptians. If anything, Western European feudalism was a brief interlude given the thousands of years ancient civilizations lasted.
Those guys weren’t absolute monarchs, either. They had to share power with clergy and aristocracy, too. Sometimes one tried to wrest all the control to themselves, like Akhenaten, but that usually ended poorly. The concept of the divine right of kings means that the King only answers to God and is never to be questioned. Meanwhile, for most of the history, rulers usually held something like the Chinese Heavenly Mandate: as long as everything went well, they had the blessing of the gods. If things started going downhill, however, it was a sign that the mandate was lost and the throne was up for grabs.
I feel like it’s still more honest than the corporate tyranny we struggle under in the modern age, though. Polite wording and effusive marketing have taken the place of baldly stated death threats.
Maybe.But this bad SyFy take ain’t it.
This just makes me wish we had got an actual The Mists of Avalon adaptation instead of something based on an upcoming YA novel by Frank fucking Miller.
There was one, years ago. It was… not great.
There was one already
I’m…I’m seriously worried about the fact that Frank Miller YA is a thing…
Langford needs to stfu.