Actors often undertake boot camps before playing a specific role – whether it’s training as a military unit for a war drama or getting down the basics of an instrument to pass as a celebrated musician in a biopic. When German actress Emilia Schule won the title role in 18th century royal drama Marie Antoinette, she didn’t expect to experience a boot camp, but her first trip to Paris for a costume fitting quickly proved to be illustrative.

“I was terrified. I was flying there and most of the crew didn’t speak any English, and I was there for hours, and they would talk over my head in French the entire time,” the 29-year-old recalls. “I actually felt sick because my body wasn’t used to standing still for so many hours. I couldn’t move because of the costumes, so I was being dressed and undressed.”

Isolated, unheard and stripped of your physical agency – these were historic echoes. For a few days, Schule had a partial sense of what it was like to be Marie Antoinette, the youngest daughter of Austria’s Emperor and Empress, who in 1770 at the age of 14 was sent from her home in Vienna to the Palace of Versailles, where she was thrust into the venal politics and foreign rituals of court life as the wife of Louis-Auguste, heir to the French throne.

The historical fact is clear: in 1774, Louis-Auguste became Louis XVI, the king of an increasingly frayed France. As queen, Marie-Antoinette would bear his children, including the necessary male heir, but her unpopularity grew due to scandals as inequality overtook France. The French Revolution overthrew the monarchy in 1791, the royal couple were both sentenced to the guillotine the following year. Marie Antoinette was 36 years old.

“We all know how it ends, but it’s a new take on her life. It read in part like a nightmare and was a very subjective experience – she was a 14-year-old sent away from home in Austria to go to Paris,” Schule says. “She’s scared to death, and you really feel for her and how traumatising this is. Yes, she was going to become queen, but she didn’t ask for that. If she’d had the choice she would have stayed with her mum, instead of never seeing her again.”

At 8am on a weekday morning, Schule is speaking via video call from London, where she’s taking a sabbatical after finishing the first of what is intended to be three seasons of Marie Antoinette to study filmmaking at the MetFilm School. She missed the week on directing actors due to a sinus infection, but Schule has been flourishing while working behind the camera on editing, cinematography and screenwriting. Her last role hasn’t entirely dissipated, though.

“I really noticed that this character gave me energy because Marie Antoinette is about joy. Obviously her life was tragic and the environment she was living in was hostile, but I wish I’d kept that Marie Antoinette energy,” Schule says. “She got me through filming for seven months because it was quite exhausting shooting every day with the hair and wardrobe preparation. Four hours of the day would be over before we filmed anything.”

Loading