Warning: Major spoilers for season three of Wonderful thing forward — proceed with caution.
“Grief is strange.”
Those words, uttered in just a moment Wonderful thing killing one of its two main characters, is a harbinger of what’s to come in the newly released third installment. While Elle Fanning‘s Catherine the Great has avoided death threats and political coups since landing in Russia, the queen is safe for now. Instead, it was her strangely lovable and tender husband, formerly known as Peter the Great (played by Peter). Nicholas Hoult), who died in the season’s sixth episode.
The circumstances surrounding the king’s actual death are still murky – but it is widely known that Peter was assassinated by Alexei Orlov, younger brother of Catherine’s then-lover, Grigory Orlov, while being abandoned. prison. The show got off to a steep start. Haunted by the fear that he will be remembered only as a taciturn stay-at-home husband to his powerful wife (“Yes, for that is what history remembers – good fathers,” one adult-sized hallucinations of his newborn son, Paul, taunts), Peter begins a wretched invasion of Sweden. Catherine tries to assuage his anxiety and pauses the mission, but Peter won’t be discouraged. He continued riding across a frozen lake — pausing to turn to his wife with a weak, “Actually —” before quickly falling back into the ice as Catherine watched in horror.
“God, the whole day was filled with so many emotions,” Fanning recounts Vanity Fair. “[Series creator] Tony [McNamara], Nick and I, we secretly went into the woods before doing the last scene together. We drink some vodka and celebrate. It was a very special moment.” After the last huzzah was uttered, Fanning was left to lead the show without his other half and—in the end—makes the loss laughable.
“I am most afraid of the part Later his death,” she said, “was when Catherine was in utter grief and in extreme denial. I put a lot of pressure on myself to describe it in a certain way…. It was like, oh, Nick was gone. [It’s] such a flaw in the program…. I don’t want it to go downhill…. But now a big death has happened and we don’t want the show to get upset because we’re a comedy. It is the rigor of the battle between tragedy and comedy and the absurdists.
Just appeared at the Met Gala (Billie Eilish And Finneas O’Connell are her two table mates), Fanning talked to VF about mourning her royal mate and how ending that music brought her real-life serenity: “I started [the show] when I was 20, now I’m 25. A lot of these experiences have shaped me.”
Vanity Fair: Before we get into the big event of this season, I want to ask about the marital status of Peter and Catherine in season three. They decided to get over some pretty big hurdles, but they still slept with knives under their pillows. What makes them so invested in each other?
Elle Fanning: Obviously it’s complicated, but I believe it’s a mature love in season three. In season two, Catherine—finally, when she stabs Pugachev thinking it was Peter, her painful reaction to it makes her realize, oh, I can’t lose this person. Because in many ways he’s the only one who understands her completely in court, which is really fascinating. He rules the country. Whether you think he did it badly or not, he knows the pressures of it like no other. So Catherine realizes that he really does see her for who she is and that she doesn’t want to lose that friendship.
