Sometimes modern dramas will take classic literary or real-life characters and make them “cool” and relatable to the audience that is watching in ways that we didn’t know these icons to be. Later this year, TNT is dipping into that well with Will, a new drama that tells the story of the dreamer William Shakespeare before he had everything together and was one of the most famous writers of all time.
Will explores Shakespeare’s young and rough-and-tumble life and how he, like many of us in the present day, was desperate to succeed in his city. There’s a lot of talent behind the camera, including creator Craig Pearce who wrote The Great Gatsby, Moulin Rouge and Romeo and Juliet features. The director of the Will pilot is Shekhar Kapur who directed Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth, among other things.
Playing the young Shakespeare is Laurie Davidson who recently spoke alongside the show’s producers at the Cable portion of the Television Critics Association press tour.
“We have to remember we are seeing him before everything we know about this guy,” Davidson explained about where we meet “Will” at this point in time. “We’ve had 400 years in our minds to go, ‘He was this great’ — ‘this person, this
literary genius.’ But we are seeing him right at the beginning of that story where he doesn’t even know himself or where it’s going to end up. So I think, in that way, it has to be a very different person from the history books,” he warned, making it sound like what we might see might be an alternative from the Shakespeare we know about.
Creator Craig Pearce also pointed out that history books are just someone’s opinion anyway because Shakespeare is likely the most famous person in the world that no one knows anything about.
“There’s not one letter, not one personal diary entry written by him that survived. All we have is his vast body of work. It’s a little bit like, you know, the Bible. You read into that work what you want to read into it because, really, he wrote about everything in the beginning. In these last years, he was just struggling to find who he was and to find his voice like so many of us today.”
Will premieres later this year on TNT.
