Clarke is set to portray statesman and military expert Grigory Potemkin on the Philip Martin-directed series.
- July 20, 2018
AceShowbiz - Zero Dark Thirty (2012) star Jason Clarke and Dame Helen Mirren are to play lovers in a new Catherine the Great drama.
Mirren will play the Russian royal in the HBO/Sky limited series, while Clarke is set to portray statesman and military expert Grigory Potemkin, who romanced the empress towards the end of her reign in the 18th century.
The project reteams Mirren with Emmy Award winner Philip Martin, who directed her in Prime Suspect.
It will be somewhat of a passion project for The Queen star, who can trace her roots back to Russia - born Helen Lydia Mironoff, her father was a Russian immigrant to the U.K. from Smolensk Oblast.
Mirren's grandfather, Colonel Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, was a leader of the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He later became a diplomat.
Helen's father anglicised the family name to Mirren in the 1950s.
She previously portrayed a Russian in the films Woman in Gold and The Last Station, a biopic of the last years of author Leo Tolstoy's life.
Mirren will also executive produce Catherine the Great.
Meanwhile, Australian actor Clarke is enjoying quite a bit of movie success by playing real people - he recently portrayed politician Ted Kennedy in Chappaquiddick and he will appear as Nazi villain Reinhard Heydrich in The Man With the Iron Heart and as Edward Higgins White, the first American to walk in space, in director Damien Chazelle's Neil Armstrong biopic, First Man.
