Nikki K

I completely agree. Thank you for putting me on the list!

I remember when the show as on that people on ONTD and TVline etc. kept complaining about Rachel as Elizabeth and how they wanted her to be recast, I honestly didn't get it at all. I've watched the two movies with Cate Blanchett, the mini-series "The Virgin Queen" (2005, BBC) with Anne-Marie Duff and of course Laoise Murray on playing Elizabeth as a teenager on "The Tudors". I thought every actress brought something special to the role and of course the productions they were starring in were all a bit different. I thought in Cate's performance in the first movie you saw a lot of insecurity at the beginning of her reign –*I wondered whether the progression we saw throughout the movies was a result of the writers not wanting to assume any previous historical knowledge by the audience and of course while the movies were long, they still had to condense things a lot. So all in all, while I loved Cate's performance, there was also the time gap between movies and I felt we at times the character development was very rushed. That's of course the strength of a TV show that you have more time to develop a character fully. The advantage that "The Virgin Queen" had was surely that it focused on Elizabeth and how her relationship with her sister had deteriorated before the latter's death. So I thought to bring that back to "Reign" that Rachel actually did a remarkable job with the thing that writers are told not to do – the "tell instead of show" – she would always have to explain to Lola or Gideon (or Dudley in season 3) why she was reacting harshly to this thing or that thing because of all her screwed up family dynamics and all the complicated feelings she had where both her father and her mother were concerned. I thought that was a hard task to deliver all this with enough emotion but not have it be over the top and Rachel did that perfectly in my opinion. /rant