Although they lived in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Borgias,
the subject of a new nine-part Showtime miniseries that began Sunday,
were a family made for TV.
The Borgias were rich, ruthless, scheming and
corrupt - and so sexually voracious that if you believe the rumors,
they slept with everyone, including one another.
Mario Puzo, who worked on a novel about them, called the Borgias
the Corleones of the Renaissance.
They also resemble "The Sopranos" a
little. Imagine if Tony, instead of running a garbage hauling business,
had bought himself the papacy.
"The Borgias," which cost $45 million to make, was created,
written and produced by film director Neil Jordan, who also directed
several episodes.
It's Showtime's latest entry in what is becoming a high-stakes
game on cable TV now that it's no longer enough merely to show Hollywood
movies or the odd sporting event.
If you want to sell cable
subscriptions these days, you need not just original programming but a
long-running, franchise-defining series such as "The Tudors," Showtime's
recent hit.
A bankable star doesn't hurt either.
In the new series, the
Borgia paterfamilias, Rodrigo - who became Pope Alexander VI - is played
by Jeremy Irons. He's not exactly typecast.
To judge from his famous portrait by Cristofano dell'Altissimo,
the historical Rodrigo, corpulent and hatchet nosed, looked as if he had
been inflated with a tire pump.
At the time of his death, or so the
legend goes, he was so bloated and debauched that when his body was
inserted into the coffin, someone had to jump on the lid to get it shut.
"When we first talked about the part, Jeremy was worried that he
didn't have that bulbous weight," Jordan said recently, speaking by
phone from his house in Ireland.
"I told him that if we can get this guy
properly situated, torn between God and politics, the weight wouldn't
matter."
Irons, still elegantly handsome at 62, doesn't look much like
Pope Alexander.
He nevertheless has, both on screen and in person, a
slightly detached, regal quality; a darting, glinting intelligence; and
occasionally an air of weary melancholy.
All are very useful papal
attributes.
He also has a long history of playing characters who are morally
ambiguous if not outright villainous: Humbert Humbert in "Lolita"; the
deranged twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers"; and
the accused wife poisoner Claus von Buelow in "Reversal of Fortune" (for
which he won an Academy Award).
And with that deep, rumbling voice,
like an organ echoing in a cathedral, he sounds the way a Renaissance
pope should sound: the sibilant S's, the luxurious drawn-out vowels
suggesting knowledge acquired outside the seminary.
The roles of characters who are strange
or morally enigmatic have come to him, he went on, partly by accident -
or because he has a reputation for playing them. It's also partly
because he has sought them out.
"Certainly they attract me," he said. "I'm always interested in
good and evil, who's a good person, who's a bad person, believing,
really, that we're all rather gray."
No one is grayer than Rodrigo Borgia,
who bought the papacy in a rigged election, had numerous mistresses and
fathered four children - yet was also a skilled diplomat and patron of
the arts.
Jordan said he thought the whole family has suffered from bad
press because "a lot of the history was written by Rodrigo's
successors."
Irons said that in researching the part, he made a list of all
the qualities attributed to Rodrigo Borgia.
"The list goes all the way
from generous man, wonderful company, a great organizer to poisoner,
cruel and despotic, all the worst adjectives you can think of."