Julianne Moore’s character, Mary Villiers, opens Starz’s new limited series Mary & George as Logan Roy might have, if he had been born a woman in the 16th century. The first scene shows Mary giving birth to a second son. A maid drops the baby on the floor, and when the gasping infant is finally placed in Mary’s arms, she tells her newborn, “Perhaps we should have left you on the floor to rot. Do you know why?” 

As a second son, “You will inherit nothing of human value,” Mary informs him coldly. Fortunately, Mary has a use for the boy she decides to name George. The seven-part series, which premieres in the US on April 5, jumps forward to see Mary grooming her handsome son (Nicholas Galitzine) to become King James I’s favorite and lover.

George Villiers’s status as a royal favorite is well-documented; he caught James I’s eye and began a sexual relationship with the king that granted him and his family power, properties, and titles. (Per the BBC, George was “the only person outside of the royal family to be appointed as an English duke at that time.”) But less is known about his mother’s machinations—how she worked her way out of being an impoverished, widowed mother of four to live as a consort at the king’s court with her son, who was rechristened by James as the Duke of Buckingham.

“I don’t think it’s particularly great parenting,” deadpans Moore in a recent Zoom. “But [Mary’s] someone who featured in history who’s not talked about, and when she is talked about, she’s vilified. And it’s like, wait a minute. Why would she be vilified? Why would someone have depicted her as a witch when in fact she managed to achieve a lot for herself and set up all of her kids?” 

The Starz miniseries is based on Benjamin Woolley’s 2017 book, The King’s Assassin: The Fatal Affair of George Villiers and James I, “which doesn’t mention Mary a great deal,” Moore admits. “He does talk about how she, in educating her sons, got a tutor for them and was informed that they weren’t particularly scholarly. But that George was a great dancer, so that’s why she ended up sending him to France and tried to educate him in the manners of the court. It’s like she saw that his path forward was going to be somewhat different.”

Moore signed on to play this mysterious real woman because of “how audacious and front-footed and vivid and articulate and funny and fast” Mary was in the script from playwright D.C. Moore (who is of no relation to the actor). There’s an early scene in which George attempts to tell his mother he doesn’t want to go to France—he wants to stay in town and continue dating a woman who certainly won’t help improve his family’s station in life. After Mary waves off such foolish fantasies—“that’s not how the world works!”—and tells him to dream bigger. “If I were a man and I looked like you,” she tells her petulant son, “I would rule the fucking world.” 

Says Moore, “She’s exhausted by what she perceives to be his indolence. It’s like, ‘Come on, you have all this opportunity and you’re going to waste it.’” Channeling her character, Moore says, “‘I’m going to make sure [George’s] going to get us all out of here.’ And she does it through him.”

Mary choreographs a meeting between her son and the king—the first of many mother-son schemes. And given Mary and George’s chosen path to power, their story is fodder for plenty of queer love scenes—a rarity in period dramas. Speaking about the scenes, Moore says, “One of our producers said the other night at our premiere, ‘A lot of us think about this period of time through a Victorian lens, which is a very repressed period, when in fact there was definitely more fluidity. There was much more acceptance of the king having relationships with other men.’ No matter what you called it or how you identified it, there was a possibility for fluidity because the king did have children with Queen Anne (Trine Dyrholm).” Moore, who did not know much about Villiers before the project, says she was surprised to find love letters that James had written to George, beginning with the affectionate phrase, “To my sweet child and wife.”

“[Mary] is someone who has no autonomy and no agency and no property and no value, except through the men that she’s married to, or her male children,” Moore previously told BBC. “There’s something very overt about what she does…. It’s like: why not? She sees with George that he’s a proxy for her. He’s who she wishes she could be.”

The series is delicious in its costuming and court warfare. And despite the time period in which it takes place, it gives plenty of screen time to women and queer characters at various levels of power. “People are always like, ‘Who has the property? Who has the ownership?’” Moore tells me. “And if you manage to have ownership, if you have some monetary value, you have some agency. Even the queen, she’s someone who’s amazingly high status, but is sidelined by virtue of being female, and the king outranks her. So it’s always like, who’s on top?”

As Mary becomes more powerful, her status is telegraphed by her increasingly elaborate and expensive costumes. “No matter what period you’re in, whether it’s modern or not, clothes are signifiers,” Moore says. “They tell the world who we are, or how we perceive ourselves, or how we would like to be perceived.”

The corseted costumes were integral to Moore’s transformation into Mary, especially since the actor began filming the Starz series several weeks after playing a Mary Kay Letourneau–like character in Netflix’s contemporary drama May December. The actor hopes that, by watching Mary & George, viewers will similarly drift into her character’s state of being.

“I was just reading about how people learn—do you learn from exposure to books, or other people, or teachers?” she says. “And there’s an argument that watching a movie or anything like that can also be a way to change, because you are entering somebody else’s perspective. It could even be a gentle way to change. You don’t know that you’ve been kind of immersed in someone else’s story or someone else’s point of view…. No one’s here to teach anybody a lesson. That’s what you hope will happen—you want people to be immersed enough to be affected by a different point of view.”