{"id":534943,"date":"2026-06-14T15:28:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T15:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/534943\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T15:28:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T15:28:07","slug":"vikings-creator-michael-hirst-on-upcoming-show-bloodaxe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/534943\/","title":{"rendered":"Vikings’ Creator Michael Hirst on Upcoming Show ‘Bloodaxe’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tGet ready for \u201cBloodaxe<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe shot the first season last year and it\u2019s spectacular,\u201d writer and executive producer Michael Hirst<\/a>, best known for \u201cVikings<\/a>,\u201d tells\u00a0Variety at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival<\/a>. The second season of the historical drama \u2013 set in the 10th century \u2013 is already in the works.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile \u201cVikings\u201d fans will flock to see it, \u201cit\u2019s a new world,\u201d he stresses.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere has already been a follow-up to \u2018Vikings,\u2019 \u2018Vikings: Valhalla,\u2019 which I had nothing to do with. This is a new story, set 100 years later, with a completely new cast.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn \u201cBloodaxe,\u201d Hirst will explore the antics of the warrior Erik Bloodaxe, his wife Gunnhild and Egil, \u201ca killer and a poet.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTo me, Egil was a gift from the gods. In Iceland, he\u2019s one of the country\u2019s founding fathers. He\u2019s full of contradictions, so you never quite know where he\u2019s going to go,\u201d enthuses Hirst.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe can be gentle and kind, and then he\u2019s completely brutal. In the first episode, he\u2019s sleeping with the wives of three fishermen, who keep asking him for a new poem. When the fishermen return, they can\u2019t kill him on the spot, because \u201cthe wives wouldn\u2019t forgive them.\u2019\u201d Egil is totally fearless. You recognize he has a soul, and out of that soul comes his poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe show will embrace magical realism.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe live in angry times, and everything is horrible, including a lot of the shows. But I\u2019ve always loved magical realism. King Arthur, the Bible \u2013 that\u2019s magical realism, too. You have to be very careful how you use it, though, and the audience needs to be aware that you\u2019re emphasizing something real.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHirst is still very interested in power, he admits. And families.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEverything I write is about families \u2013 even \u2018Billy the Kid\u2019.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tNow, he will depict an ageing king trying to determine which of his sons should succeed him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cErik is a great warrior and an extremely brave young man. Egil became famous because he was such a brilliant raider, but he\u2019s impulsive. Then there\u2019s Haakon, who was sent to England to be brought up by the King of Wessex. Now, he doesn\u2019t know where his spirit lies. One time, he goes to church and tries to pray to Christ but suddenly the room is full of ravens and when he looks up, there\u2019s Odin standing in front of him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first season will focus mostly on the conflict between Erik and Haakon, he says. \u201cAnd Egil is the joker in the pack.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHirst became a storyteller at the tender age of 10 \u2013 \u201cI started writing little stories, and of course I was the hero in all of them\u201d \u2013 but his real break came when he met acclaimed director Nicolas Roeg.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI was trying to buy the rights to his film \u2018Bad Timing,\u2019 and I invented some excuse to see him. He read my short stories and invited me to his apartment, where I stayed from 8pm until 4am in the morning. Those hours changed my life completely,\u201d he recalls.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe said: \u2018Your stories are all right, but what is it that you want, Michael?\u2019 I\u2019d never thought about it before, so I burst into tears.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRoeg threw his first script out of the window, but by that time, he had already caught the bug. His unrealized script about Napoleon led to Cate Blanchett starrer \u201cElizabeth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI didn\u2019t want to be conventional in any way. Nic wasn\u2019t, and he was always challenging me.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cElizabeth\u201d director Shekhar Kapur\u2019s lack of in-depth knowledge about Queen Elizabeth proved to be a strength. \u201cHe kept asking local taxi drivers what they thought of her! This enabled us to depict her as a young woman in a really tough place, and that\u2019s why people liked it. They could identify with her.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe adds: \u201cThat\u2019s when I really came of age.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Tudors\u201d and \u201cVikings\u201d followed, but there\u2019s still one story he would like to make one day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s based on a book called \u2018Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village,\u2019\u201d written by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, first published in 1975.<\/p>\n

\n\tSet in medieval times, it explores the conflict between the local Cathar sect, viewed as heretics, and the Catholic Church.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Cathars believed that Jesus was just an ordinary man, and then the Inquisition came in. The book is full of interviews with the inhabitants of a small village in the Pyrenees. You get to find out about their sexual lives, their beliefs and the social structure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe book left him \u201cspellbound.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSome of the things they did and believed in were out of this world. For example, the shepherds would take their sheep over the Pyrenees in winter, where they would meet the Dead. And they would exchange messages! There\u2019s that magical realism again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBut magical realism doesn\u2019t work unless there\u2019s reality.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Get ready for \u201cBloodaxe.\u201d \u201cWe shot the first season last year and it\u2019s spectacular,\u201d writer and executive producer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534944,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[265],"tags":[230130,18,117,19,17,230131,230132,128,168414],"class_list":["post-534943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-bloodaxe","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-michael-hirst","tag-monte-carlo-television-festival","tag-tv","tag-vikings"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116749173170214721","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}