Anne Boleyn: Critics praise Jodie Turner-Smith but find fault elsewhere

Jodie Turner-Smith plays Henry VIII's second wife in the three-part series

A new drama about Anne Boleyn has been praised for casting black actress Jodie Turner-Smith in the title role, though other aspects left critics unimpressed.

Channel 5's three-part series charts the final months of the queen's life, leading up to her execution in 1536.

The Times said Turner-Smith's casting brought an "instant distinctiveness" to the "frisky" historical drama.

But the Telegraph found the show itself "really quite bad", calling its script "leaden" and direction "lumpen".

Meanwhile, the Independent said it was "debatable whether the series as a whole truly adds anything new to its heroine's legacy".

Anne Boleyn was the second wife of Henry VIII, the mother of Elizabeth I and the first queen of England to be executed.

Her life and death have been dramatised many times before, notably in Wolf Hall in which she was played by Claire Foy.

Mark Stanley (left) plays Henry, who famously had Anne beheaded

The Guardian's Lucy Mangan accepted the shadow of that BBC drama "looms large" but said Anne Boleyn "works well enough on its own terms".

She said Turner-Smith made a "superb" Anne, calling the actress "unshakeably regal" and "every inch the embattled queen."

"What having a person of colour in the role does do, perhaps, is give us a way in to understanding the marginalisation of the Boleyns at the time," she continued.

"The class, sex and religious prejudices held against them by various factions, and that we have largely lost to time, can be mapped on to the racial prejudice that endures."

Paapa Essiedu plays Anne's brother George in the series, which continues on Wednesday at 21:00 BST before reaching its conclusion on Thursday.

'Tiresomely old hat'

The Telegraph's Anita Singh concurs that casting a black actress as Anne "could be a clever way of illustrating [her] outsider status at court".

Yet she goes on to lament that "the colour-blind casting suggests a boldness that simply isn't evident elsewhere" in this "tiresomely old hat" drama.

"Seeing a black woman navigate her way through a largely white world... only reinforces the cruelty, distrust and casual undermining Anne is subjected to," writes The Independent's Adam White.

Claire Foy played Anne in the BBC's Wolf Hall drama

Yet he had less time for the drama's "heightened soapiness" and suggested its costumes "look like relics from an am-dram dressing-up box".

Flora Carr of the Radio Times was more complimentary towards the show, which she said "brilliantly captured the essence of the doomed Anne Boleyn".

However, the Daily Mail's Christopher Stevens gave just two stars, dismissing it as "a steaming pile of codswallop".

"Half the dialogue is lumpen and the rest is ludicrous," he continued, accusing its script of "lurching from fake Shakespeare to millennial slang".

Born in Peterborough to Jamaican parents, Turner-Smith was previously seen in 2019's Queen & Slim and Amazon Prime's Without Remorse.

The 34-year-old is married to former Dawson's Creek star Joshua Jackson, with whom she had a child in April 2020.