Couple brings Victoria to life

She may be dating her prince in real life but Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes enjoyed feisty arguments filming season two of Victoria.

As the drama returns, Jenna tells us that she loves playing the monarch when she is at her grumpiest and particularly relished the scene where she angrily threw a hairbrush at Tom, who plays her husband, Prince Albert.

"The biggest challenge is to get that fire in their relationship," says Jenna. "When it's worked the best has been without rehearsal and the director has said, 'Let's go bold and not rehearse, and go straight into shooting.' This has worked particularly well for the argument scenes. Sometimes a bit of over-rehearsal can be a killer.

"It's fun doing such scenes. On the first day of shooting I throw a hairbrush at him and it hit him and broke and had to be glued back together."

The new season picks up a month after the birth of her first child, also named Victoria, and the Queen is in a foul mood.

"She hated being pregnant and wrote in her diary that it was the only thing she dreaded," says Jenna, 31. "Basically she's been in confinement since her baby was born because in those days they believed that women who had just given birth should lie horizontally for a month and not move. So when we meet her, she has been fussed over for a month, unable to do anything for herself and she is not in the best of tempers.

"When she does return to her duties she finds Albert has effectively taken over in her absence and she doesn't like it. The first series was all about her relationship with Lord Melbourne and Albert arriving, the proposal and the wedding but we hadn't really delved into their married life. Series two gives us the opportunity to really get into the love between Victoria and Albert and the shifting of power as well as her keeping firm hands on the crown while being a mother.

"Their relationship is interesting to play because although they have a passionate love for each other they have opposing temperaments. He is scientific, logical, methodical and shy, and she is reactionary, emotionally led and impulsive. Put those two together and there are fireworks.

"I am not naturally an argumentative person or confrontational so it's interesting playing a person like that. It's one of those things about Victoria that is very opposite to me."

The two actors are coy when it comes to talking about their off-screen relationship but Jenna does say that knowing Tom so well helps in playing husband and wife on screen.

"There's an experience there, a history that you can really work off together and challenge each other. We are trying to recreate one of the greatest love stories there has ever been and you never want to lose their passionate love but at the same time, their occasional complete annoyance with each other. There's a lot to keep pushing there. The power struggle between them ebbs and flows."

Tom, 32, adds, "You hope you're going to work with actors you're in tune with and with Jenna there was a lot of playing around and that playfulness is really necessary. Things happen from riffing off each other."

This season covers nearly six years. Despite hating pregnancy, Victoria gave birth to nine children. Within three months of having their first child she was devastated to find herself pregnant again and it was Albert who got the blame.

"Later in life she said to Albert, 'You ruined my first couple of years of marriage, do you know that?' She explained that if she hadn't been pregnant she would have been free to enjoy the first couple of years of honeymoon and marriage. But there is a misconception that she didn't like her children. In her diaries she talks about them a lot and you can see she was a doting mum. It was being pregnant that she didn't like."

Dame Diana Rigg, who played Lady Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones, joins the cast as the eccentric Duchess of Buccleuch who arrives at the Palace as the new mistress of the robes.

"She's fabulous," says Jenna. 'I worked with Dame Diana before on Doctor Who when she was similarly dressed in Victorian garb, except that she had a creature attached to her chest and was trying to take over the world!"

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission.