‘The Great’ is out on Hulu! Are you liking it so far? We’ve added lots of stills and promotional pictures from the show in the gallery, check those below:

Warning: This article contains spoilers about The Great.

Disembodied heads, men in bear suits, and outrageous love scenes were all in a day’s work for Elle Fanning on the set of her new Hulu series The Great (now streaming).

In it, she plays the eponymous young Catherine the Great, the longest-ruling female leader of Russia, as she plots to overthrow her husband, the mercurial Emperor Peter (Nicholas Hoult). Created by writer Tony McNamara (The Favourite), the satirical dramedy prides itself on only being “occasionally true” and frequently anachronistic, and as such it revels in its ludicrous moments.

EW spoke with Fanning about all those wild scenes, the changes she insisted on as an executive producer, the future of the series, and more.

 This is the first time you executive-produced a TV series. Why was this the right project to jump into that?

This wasn’t necessarily something that I went after to produce, the script kind of came to me. And it was a gift in that way because Tony had thought of me when thinking about doing the show. The script that I read [first] was actually a film script that was based off a play that Tony had written and had put on in Australia. And the script spans all of Catherine’s life, mostly, so the young part was just a sliver. So when he gave it to me, he’s like, “Well, you know, there’s maybe the possibility of it being a TV show and you could play the young version, and the first season would be about her rise to power.” I hadn’t even seen The Favourite, so I had nothing to compare it to. So of course the script shocked me in a new and amazing way. And he asked me if I wanted to produce it and come on and go and pitch with him. And so it really was all amazing luck.
Read More

There’s something to be said, given all Catherine the Great did in her lifetime as the late 18th-century ruler of Russia, that the unfortunate bestiality rumor — you know, the one about the horse — remains.

“Fake news,” said Elle Fanning on the Variety After Show, presented by National Geographic, on Instagram Live. “It’s pretty sad [that] this extraordinary, almost — dare I say — first feminist icon has been reduced to this horse rumor,” she said.

Fanning plays the Russian empress in her new Hulu satirical series, “The Great,” which kicks off with Catherine’s arrival in the country to wed the mercurial, temperamental Peter (Nicholas Hoult). Her optimism about the union is quickly dissolved as Hoult’s Peter soon reveals his capacity for cruelty and selfishness, leading to her plans for a coup. The show, as Variety critic Caroline Framke puts it, “straddles the line between period drama and slapstick comedy with acrobatic ease.”

Read More

The stars of the new TV miniseries about Catherine the Great, ‘The Great’, already have a great deal of experience behind them, even though they’re still pretty young. Nicholas Hoult and Elle Fanning both started out as child actors — Hoult made his first film when he was just 7 years old, while Fanning made her debut at age 3! Now that they’ve both made it to adulthood while maintaining successful careers, they told us why they feel like they were able to beat the notorious child actor curse.

Via