72 Films has been commissioned to make a new 3×60 TV mini-series, Royal Kill List featuring Olivier Award winner Sheila Atim, BAFTA Award winner, Jared Harris, and SAG Award winner, Joseph Fiennes.
The co-production between A+E Networks EMEA and Sky will premiere on Sky HISTORY in early 2024.
Royal Kill List looks back at one of the most seismic events in British royal history. On 30th January 1649, for the first and only time, a British monarch, King Charles I, was publicly executed, having been tried and convicted of treason by Parliament. This heralded ten years of Britain as a republic before, in May 1660, the monarchy was restored with the accession of King Charles II.
While publicly planning his own lavish coronation to take place the following year, in April 1661, the new king had, behind the scenes, ordered an exhaustive search for the death warrant ordering his father’s execution. On finding it and the 59 signatories appended to it – only 38 of whom were still alive by that time – Charles ordered the biggest manhunt in royal history.
Told through dramatic reconstruction, with the actors serving as primary storytellers – Sheila Atim for the Royalists, Jared Harris for the Regicides, and Joseph Fiennes for King Charles II – the mini-series “plays out as a Jacobean tragedy detailing the king’s lifelong obsession to hunt down, try and kill all those responsible for his father’s execution and his own desperate flight into exile.”
The series affords a glimpse into the largely forgotten or untold stories of the influential women at court, in whose hands the lives of some of the most prominent of the regicides ultimately rested.
Dan Korn, Vice President of Programming at A+E Networks EMEA, said: “Following the celebrations that recently heralded a new Carolean era, there can be no better time to revisit the events surrounding one of King Charles III’s most famous antecedents and namesakes, whose defiance of Parliament set in train a series of bloody events whose historic legacy endures to this day.”
Julian Jones, Executive Producer from 72 Films, said: “After the success of our previous collaboration, “Royal Bastards: Rise of the Tudors,” we are thrilled to be teaming up once again with Sky History. Royal Kill List takes us to one of the most precarious, resonant, and bloody moments in British history where the entire idea of monarchy hangs in the balance, and the story of how Charles II takes back the throne plays like the ultimate revenge thriller.”
The series was commissioned and executive-produced by Dan Korn, VP of Programming at A+E Networks EMEA, with Diana Carter, Commissioning Editor and Head of Talent at A+E Networks UK.
For 72 Films, a Fremantle company, the series will be exec-produced by David Glover and Julian Jones and directed by Alice Smith.
For Sky, the series is commissioned by Zai Bennett, Sky’s Managing Director of Content, and Poppy Dixon, Director of Documentaries. Hayley Reynolds, Commissioning Editor, will serve as executive producer for Sky.
Royal Kill List will premiere on Sky HISTORY in the Spring of 2024.
Jon Creamer
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