Although the Borgias lived in the 15th and 16th centuries, it’s as if they were made for cable TV. The subject of a new mini-series, they were rich, ruthless, and corrupt, and so sexually voracious that they slept with everyone, including one another.
Mario Puzo, who wrote a novel about them, called the Borgias the Renaissance version of the Corleones of “The Godfather” fame . They also resemble “The Sopranos.” Imagine if Tony, instead of running a garbage hauling business, had bought himself the papacy.
“The Borgias ” was created, written and produced by the film director Neil Jordan for Showtime, an American cable network, which began showing the series April 3. The Borgia paterfamilias, Rodrigo, who became Pope Alexander VI, is played by Jeremy Irons, not exactly typecast. The historical Rodrigo looked as if he had been inflated . At the time of his death, he was so bloated and debauched that when his body was inserted into the coffin, someone had to jump on the lid .
“When we first talked about the part, Jeremy was worried that he didn’t have that bulbous weight,” Mr. Jordan said recently. “I told him that if we can get this guy properly situated, torn between God and politics, the weight wouldn’t matter.”
Mr. Irons, still elegantly handsome at 62, has, both on screen and in person, a slightly detached, regal quality, a darting, glinting intelligence, and occasionally an air of weary melancholy, all very useful papal attributes. He also has a long history of playing characters who are morally ambiguous : Humbert Humbert in “Lolita”; the twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers”; Claus von Bulow in “Reversal of Fortune” (for which he won an Academy Award); even Scar in “The Lion King.” And with that deep, rumbling voice, he sounds the way a Renaissance pope should sound , suggesting knowledge acquired outside the seminary.
The roles of characters who are strange or morally enigmatic have come to Mr. Irons partly by accident, or because he has a reputation for playing them, and partly because he has sought them out.
“Certainly they attract me,” he said. “I’m always interested in good and evil, who’s a good person, who’s a bad person, believing, really, that we’re all rather gray.”
No one is grayer than Rodrigo Borgia, who bought the papacy in a rigged election, had numerous mistresses and fathered four children yet was also a skilled diplomat and renowned patron of the arts. Mr. Jordan said he thought the whole family has suffered from bad press: “A lot of the history was written by Rodrigo’s successors, especially by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who became Pope Julius II. There was no Gibbon or Niall Ferguson to write about the Borgias, and so they become a little demonized.”
He added that what he found interesting in writing the script was that once Rodrigo was put in the context of his family, he remained attractive no matter how evil he became. Oddly, the villain of “The Borgias” is Rodrigo’s rival, della Rovere (played by Colm Feore), a model of probity and holiness.
Mr. Irons said that in researching the part he made a list of all the qualities attributed to Rodrigo Borgia. “It was like a rainbow,” he said. “The list goes all the way from ‘generous man,’ ‘wonderful company,’ ‘a great organizer’ to ‘poisoner,’ ‘cruel’ and ‘despotic,’ all the worst adjectives you can think of. I thought: ‘That’s very interesting. Maybe it’s all true.
Maybe from different vantage points all those adjectives could be seen to be the truth.’ Film is always a kind of patchwork anyway, and my hope is that Rodrigo will emerge as a man of many different colors and many different behaviors. He’s completely different when he’s being persuaded by his daughter or bullied by the mother of his children or negotiating with the Spanish ambassador. I never judge. That’s not my job. I just try to link all those attributes.”
Mr. Jordan said: “Jeremy does manage to humanize the monster, doesn’t he? I loved him as Claus von Bulow. You had absolutely no idea what that character was thinking.”
About playing the pope, a character who is always being deferred to while being lugged around on a throne or gliding through his palace in robes, Mr. Irons said, “It’s daft, really, but someone’s got to do it.” Then he became serious and went on, “I hope the Vatican doesn’t go down the obvious path of creating a great controversy over this, though I’m sure Showtime would love that.”
He added: “I think the great strength of Neil’s script is that because he’s a very bright man and a historian who reads very widely, he’s found something possibly nearer the truth about the Borgias, though God knows what the truth really is. I’m hoping that the audience will be totally confused about whether to root for this man. It’s a bit like von Bulow, you know. Did he do it or not?”
By CHARLES McGRATH
