The first season of The Great, the new Hulu comedy miniseries produced and written by Tony McNamara, co-screenwriter of The Favourite (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018), is led by Elle Fanning as Catherine II, the longest-serving Russian female monarch in history. The fascination with Catherine the Great isn’t something new, starting with Marlene Dietrich’s iconic performance in The Scarlet Empress (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1934) and ending with HBO’s most recent production, Catherine the Great (2019), starring Helen Mirren as the experienced sovereign. In contrast to the latter representation, McNamara concentrates on the transformation of Catherine from a naïve princess of German origin, an intruder in the Romanov dynasty, into the woman who would end up orchestrating a coup d’état in order to eliminate her husband from power, leading the Russian Empire on its path towards modernization.

Andreea Pătru

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Film critic and programmer, she collaborates with various international film festivals. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Senses of Cinema, Kinoscope, Indiewire, Film Comment, Vague Visages and Desistfilm. In Spanish she has written for Caimán Cuadernos de Cine and in Romanian she collaborates with FILM magazine. Programmer and coordinator of Tenerife Shorts.

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