Elle Fanning’s performance in season three of The Great is her finest hour. I said something similar last season when she returned as Russian’s Empress, but she is permitted to chart new emotional territory in this third outing. A major change comes halfway through this season, and Catherine is forced to confront it head-on, and Fanning is ready to take the Tony McNarmara comedy series into a glorious new reign.
Spoilers for season 3 abound! I had major events spoiled for me, and I don’t wish that on anyone else.
Catherine trying to appeal to both the ambassador of England and America / maturity to how Catherine can toy with each of them
Early in season three, we see a new shade to Catherine’s bargaining power. Ambassadors to America and England are trying to win her favor, and, after every interaction, she leaves both men wanting more. Flirtation has always been a weapon in Catherine’s arsenal, and she that manipulation has been molded by other people who inhabit the palace.
“She’s definitely trying out new leadership tactics that we haven’t seen before,” Fanning says. “There is a political savviness and appetite this season, and it gives her more of a chance to manipulate. Catherine is really taking from Elizabeth and Archie this season, and she is picking up more on Elizabeth’s ability to do that since she is the queen of toying with people. I love the relationship between Catherine and Elizabeth, and Belinda is so extraordinary and clever. In the front half of the season, you really feel like, maybe this year, she will get it together and give the audience the confidence that she can be a great leader. So far, in seasons one and two, she wasn’t there yet. Catherine grows, but that doesn’t mean she always grows upwards.”
In episode six, Nicholas Hoult’s Peter falls through a frozen lake and dies as a stunned Catherine watches on firmer ground. It’s a death that is so shocking, so unexpected that it had to be unbelievable to read on the page. Even though Fanning knew it was coming in some capacity, experiencing it was a different animal.
“I knew in season two that in season three that Peter was probably going to go,” she says. “Tony [McNarmara] didn’t know what the death was going to be, but I had heard rumblings about the horse through the ice even last year. Thinking about it now, it’s such ap poignant, brilliant death for a character like Peter. It’s because his ego is too big–the heaviness of it. I didn’t know what episode it was going to be in. Tony writes as we go along, but he does have an arc for the whole season.
My jaw was on the floor. After reading it, I was just silent, but what stood out was the last scene these two characters have with each other on the ice. It was about twelve pages long, and I say something to him like, ‘We have rewritten each other in the best, most infuriating ways.’ Every time I said that line, I got emotional, because it is exactly what these two have done for each other. On a personal level, knowing that I will never play with Nick as these characters again was heartbreaking. It is a rare experience that you get scenes where you can explore and go wild and do anything. At the same time, we had to keep the humor, pace, and rhythm that we always do. He is betraying her yet again, but we were very conscious about keeping it like one of the scenes we always so. It was a tightrope to walk with him.”
After Peter dies, we realize that there are four more episodes remaining. What McNamara does for Catherine is give her plenty of room to breathe, but the arc of her grief isn’t a simple one. There is an arc in the last fifteen minutes of episode six after she witnesses his horse fall through, but there is a larger, denser arc that expands from episodes six to ten. It finally hits Catherine in a realistic way at the end of episode eight when Grigor bursts into court and exclaims, ‘He’s dead! He’s dead!’ The camera hones in on Fanning’s face, and it’s watching a dam spill over.
“The back half of the season, including halfway through six, I was very conscious that we are still a comedy–you don’t want it to become sad or lose pace. I didn’t want people to say, ‘Well, Nick is gone–the show is bad.’ I am losing my main acting partner for the show, and Nick has created a truly iconic character that will live in television history. He’s so perfect. I was scared too–I don’t know where we go from here. I felt that weight on my shoulders. What Tony did, with episode seven, is that he made her grief very manic. She is in extreme denial, so she wasn’t going to be sobbing every day since she told herself that it didn’t happen.
We had to find that line, because we didn’t want it to be just silly. It wouldn’t be believable. We have all had that experience of knowing something is wrong in your gut, but you can’t quite place what it is. Catherine is pushing that own entirely and going into this mania. I wanted to try and cram as many emotions in my mind as I can with each split second, and this season, I got to do that. When she tastes the salt at the end of seven, the train hits her. The mania is gone, and the depressing is lurking there waiting for her.”
Where does The Great go from here? Fanning acknowledges that audiences will feel the loss of Peter in subsequent seasons, but it’s truly about Catherine’s reign. Fanning is looking forward to uncertainty.
“I wanted people to feel like that she couldn’t come back from this,” Fanning says. “This is the lowest of the low–even lower than when her mother died. Peter was the driving force of her life, and, in a way, he had to get out of her way for Catherine to step into the leadership role. We love Nick, but she wasn’t her fully realized self with him around. She couldn’t focus her energy on everything she needed to. In episodes nine and ten, we are also talking about destiny–the Russian roulette stuff is so clever.”
In the final scene, Catherine is alone in a large, empty room. Her hair is shorn short and she is wearing a wide, dark dress as she absorbs the silence. When AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” comes on, it erupts into a frenetic dance of emotion. It’s youthful, ugly, freeing, and entirely on her terms. We are entering Catherine’s new era, and the show goes to black silence as the credits roll.
“That moment was so big, and there were no words,” Fanning says after a moment of reflection. “I am so used to getting scripts, and they are wordy and dense–we never have quiet moments. To end this season where so much happened in a wordless moment where she is alone was so different. The script said, ‘She starts dancing wildly,’ and that can be interpreted in so many different ways. For me, Elle, it was a very emotional season. There were so many changes. As Catherine, I let so much that I got to let out, and, with dancing, you can explore so much that you can’t with words. I love watching people dance on screen, and a big inspiration for me was Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle. It’s funny but it’s raw and private–that’s iconic to me. I got to pick the song, and we played it on set on the day. It was honestly an outpouring of emotion, because we are putting the Peter chapter to bed. In that moment, she is done with her mourning, and she is ready to move on. She needed to let that anger out.”
The Great is streaming now on Hulu.
