‘Mary & George’: Tony Curran Explains That Embalmed Heart & Why He Buried It With George
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Mary & George Episode 4, “The Wolf & The Lamb.”]
James and George’s romance reached the pinnacle of intimacy in Mary & George Episode 4. The episode saw James (Tony Curran) return to Scotland for the first time since he became King of England, his new lover, George (Nicholas Galitzine), in tow. While George can’t help himself from cheating, James is his most tender yet, and Curran delivers his best performance of the series in the episode.
James is on edge throughout the episode’s first act. His irritation and unrest are on full display when he bites George’s arm, breaking the skin, and when he plunges himself into a river in Scotland. He’s imploding after the death of Somerset (Laurie Davidson), feeling as if he can’t trust anyone, especially George. And in truth, George is extremely untrustworthy. He’s loving and doting in the room with James, but has sex with anything that moves when James is gone. James sees through George’s lies about his exploits, but he loves him anyway. He made that love as clear as one can by showing George his heart. No, literally.
Grave diggers were tasked with excavating a precious item of James’ in preparation for his arrival in Scotland. At the end of the episode, after George survives a hookup-turned-murder attempt, James shows George the preserved heart of his “first great love,” Lord Lennox.
“He died in France impoverished and alone. No one ever let me bring him back,” James says of his former love. Lennox proved his love with the grandest of gestures: “He gave me his heart, his actual heart,” James admits. The heart was embalmed and sent to James after he died, and James had it buried in a secret spot in Edinburgh.
To show the depth of his love, James reveals to George the embalmed heart contained in an iron apparatus. Showing George, and bringing the heart home, was “the real purpose” of the trip to Scotland.
“Am I a lovesick fool?” James asks George through tears. As George replies, “No, James.” James then declares, “We both are. But I’m older, and I’ve got less excuse. And I’m your king. I should know better. I’ll teach you as I’ve been taught.” They kiss, and for the first time, the love between them feels real.
Curran tells TV Insider that this scene proves that James loves George more deeply than he loved Somerset.
“The first time he admits this and tells George about it, it feels like the first time he’s actually shared it with anybody,” Curran says. “It’s quite a big moment. When you’re in love, of course there’s vulnerabilities. You give your heart over to somebody. Sharing that with George makes the way that George’s behavior has unfolded, the betrayal, all the more intense and shocking.”
King James I (Tony Curran) returns to Scotland with his lover, George Villiers (Nicholas Galitzine), at his side (STARZ)
James intended to bring Lennox’s heart back to England, but instead he returns it to its grave with George’s help. That is a powerful declaration of love, Curran says. The metaphor of digging a grave together also doesn’t escape the Scottish actor.
“It’s very symbolic, isn’t it? It’s the ultimate trust,” he says. “I’ve had it dug up. I’ve told you about it. I’ve shared with you my first love, maybe my greatest love, and now I’m putting it back in the ground. He’s giving his heart to George at that point. It’s like, you are it. That’s my past, and you are my future.”
Curran and Galitzine were very “in the moment” filming that heart reveal. The scene only took “two or three takes” to get, and Galitzine gave Curran reassurance that he nailed the moment.
“There would be moments where you finish the scene and you just say, ‘Keep rolling. Can we go back on that part?’ If you ask any actor, they’re normally never happy,” Curran says with a laugh. “I think I remember at one point saying, ‘I want to go for one more,’ just when we sat in the bed. Nick in his lovely compassionate way was like, ‘I think we got it.’ And I was like, ‘OK, kid!’ It wasn’t that many takes. I’ve never done a scene like that before, where you actually take someone’s actual heart out in a casing and share it with somebody. It’s quite a profound act to actually do, to actually share it somebody.”
You’d hope that this moment would shake some sense into George and make him faithful, but everything we know about the power-hungry George tells us that’s not likely. Still, the love between them feels as real as it can be for George. When airing his grievances to George prior to showing his heart, James says that Lennox was right and that no one would ever love him as fully and loyally. George tries to convince him otherwise, but as Curran explains, “James is wiser than people give him credit for.”
“He sees what George is up to, and loyalty is obviously a big part of James’ makeup,” Curran says. “Historically, his mother being executed, his father being assassinated, he’s always looking over his shoulder to see, are these people here for me, or are they just here for their own ends?”
He adds, “I’m not sure whether James thinks that anybody can be what Lord Lennox was to him. I think he hopes George is like that, but I think George is testing James. Not intentionally, but I think James is feeling a little bit spurned by George.”
James makes the conscious choice to trust George anyway. Revealing Lennox’s heart is James’ way of saying, “take my heart and please don’t break it.”
“It’s about as vulnerable as King James appears to be in the whole of the show,” Curran notes. “Nick [and I], we’ve talked about this before. [James] wants to take George under his wing. It’s a love affair, but it’s a business affair as well. A quid pro quo. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, Georgie boy. He wants [George] to help him. His intentions are there. And at that moment, George is also quite taken by James’ showing him what they basically came to Scotland for.”
How can George help James politically? One of them is the seat of power in England, and the other is chomping at the bit for just a taste of that influence. Curran says that the pressures of leadership make James want a lover who can alleviate the task of making decisions at times.
“James definitely wants him to take a bit of the reins,” he explains. “James is tired of the greed. He’s tired of the war mongering. He calls himself ‘Rex Pacificus,’ great king of peace, so I think with the violence that he’s had in his past, he doesn’t really want to be part of any of that.”
Putting his heart in his lover’s hands is James taking the risk of trusting George in the hopes that it will pay off. As Curran teases, “More fool him.”
Mary & George, Fridays, 9/8c, STARZ
