Trivia / The Borgias

• Dawson Casting: 23-year-old Holliday Grainger plays Lucrezia, who's 14 in the first episode. 18-year-old Cesare is played by 25-year-old François Arnaud, 33-year-old Emmanuelle Chriqui plays a teenage Sancia, and 18-year-old Giulia Farnese is played by 29-year-old Lotte Verbeek (though this last may count as Age Lift; Giulia's age is glossed over to the point where the only thing made clear is that she is much younger than Rodrigo).
  • Giulia's almost definitely an Age Lift. It's made pretty clear that she's been married to her husband for a good long time—long enough to conceive a child and learn the ways of court and men, as well as politics, on some level. She's definitely not eighteen, and probably isn't supposed to be a teenager, either. It's likely that the characterization is a combo of the real Giulia and Adriana da Mila, Lucrezia's real-life governess/mentor-type figure and a cousin to the Borgia family.
• Dueling Works: With Borgia, obviously. Both series are about the eponymous family and were first broadcast the same year.
• Fake Nationality: We have Brits playing Italians (Derek Jacobi, Sean Harris, Julian Bleach), Brits playing Spaniards (Jeremy Irons, Holliday Grainger, David Oakes, and Joanne Whalley), a Brit playing a German (Simon McBurney), a Dutch woman playing an Italian (Lotte Verbeek), a Canadian-American playing an Italian (Colm Feore), a Lithuanian playing an Italian (Ruta Gedmintas), a French-Canadian playing an Italian (Emmanuelle Chriqui), a Romanian playing a French person (Ana Ularu), a Swedish-Danish pkaying an Italian (David Dencik) and a French-Canadian playing a Spaniard (François Arnaud).
• Follow the Leader: The show was greenlit after the success of Showtime's other historical drama.
• Lying Creator: If you look at the record, the show runners were this in spades. In two of the more notable examples, they said that they wouldn't go into the Banquet of the Chestnuts, because it would be too much "even for Showtime." They did. Then they said they wouldn't go into the Cesare and Lucrezia incest before doing it as well.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: According to François Arnaud, Neil Jordan did not intentionally write Cesare and Lucrezia as a Ship Tease. The actors were instructed to stop playing it so USTy. They didn't know what else they could do with the script they'd been given. Eventually the ship won out.
  interview: When we first got to Budapest, my first rehearsal was with Holly. It was for our very first scene together. We were lying in the garden and Neil kept insisting that we had too many innuendos or it was too romantic or too sexual. And we both argued that it was already all over his writing.
  It was like there was nothing else to do. So we kept asking, "Do you want us to play against it?" Instinctively that's what came to us, and that's what worked. We had arguments, really big discussions about it in the first year, and he said, "Well, we don't know if that happened. It could all be rumors."
• Playing Against Type: Ronin Vibert, known for playing the pathetic and timid Lepidus on Rome, plays Lucrezia's rapist husband Giovanni Sforza.
• Screwed by the Network: Showrunner Neil Jordan had originally planned for the show to last for four seasons like The Tudors. So when Showtime announced that season 3 would be the last, there was an outcry from fans. Jordan later revealed that he had proposed to make a two-hour film to wrap up the storyline and give the show a Grand Finale, but Showtime declined, citing high production costs.
• Shipper on Set: While Cesare/Lucrezia did eventually become canon, showrunner Neil Jordan reportedly did not like it, and — in earlier seasons — said they weren't going there. François Arnaud (Cesare) is beloved by shippers for telling Niel that the script he wrote very much depicts the two being in love. Holliday Grainger (Lucrezia) reportedly agreed as well, but didn't give interviews about it.
  François Arnaud interview: Well to be honest we thought it was going that way from the very start of the first season. Neil Jordan, the creator of the show, denied it from the beginning but we were like "it's all over your writing man." It's in every single line, every single scene: these two are definitely in love with each other.
• What Could Have Been: It was originally supposed to be a film, simply titled "Borgia," with Colin Farrell and Scarlett Johansson as Cesare and Lucrezia, but funding fell through. Director Neil Jordan eventually found the money with the Showtime network, and thus a series was born.

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