Trivia / The Serpent Queen

• Ability over Appearance:
  • In her middle and later years, Catherine was quite overweight, while Samantha Morton clearly isn't.
  • In Real Life, one of Diane de Poitiers' most notable physical attributes was her height—5'10", which is uncommonly tall for a woman even now and would have been legitimately astounding in the sixteenth century. In this series she's played by 5'3" Ludivine Sagnier.
  • Antonia Clarke is 5 ft 4, while the real Mary of Scotland was 5 ft 11 and one of the tallest women in all of Europe.
• Billing Displacement:
  • Samantha Morton is unambiguously billed as the series' lead despite the fact that she barely appears in the first three episodes. By contrast Liv Hill (young Catherine) is credited as a "guest star."
  • Ludivine Sagnier (Diane) is listed as a recurring character, when she's the driving antagonist force of the whole show.
• The Cameo: Rupert Everett as Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor.
• Dawson Casting: At the start of the series Catherine is meant to be fourteen, but Liv Hill is in her early twenties.
• Dueling Works: Shortly after the series finished airing on Starz, a 2-part French miniseries about Diane de Poitiers starring Isabelle Adjani was broadcast. Those who caught both tended to prefer The Serpent Queen, with the general consensus being that Adjani was miscast.
• Fake Nationality: Most of the characters are either French or Italian; most of the actors and actresses are English.
• Playing Against Type: Those who have seen Ludivine Sagnier as Tinkerbell in the 2003 live-action Peter Pan or more recently as Omar Sy's ex-wife in the French Netflix hit Lupin might find that, while the Shameless Fanservice Girl aspect of her character seems right up her alley, her being essentially the main villain of the series is a bit jarring.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting: Raza Jaffrey and Ray Panthaki as brothers François and Charles Guise. They could almost be twins.
• Special Effects Failure: Catherine has a dream sequence in which she pushes Diane out of a castle window. The actual shot of Diane falling towards the courtyard is a very obvious green-screen job.
• Time-Shifted Actor: Catherine (played by Liv Hill as a teenager and by Samantha Morton as an adult) and Henri (played by Alex Heath as a teenager and Lee Ingleby as an adult).
• Troubled Production: Subverted. The fact that production took place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic actually meant that the most majestic of the French chateaux, which are typically crowded with tourists, were nearly deserted and were thus freely available for on-location shooting—once the cast and crew had completed the required health and safety procedures, that is.

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