Marie Antoinette: A ditz? A rebel? A well-dressed enigma

More than two centuries after Marie Antoinette’s death, there are opposite views. She was:
— A ditz and a spendthrift who ignored her countrymen’s poverty. She didn’t really say “let them eat cake,” but she might have thought it.
— Something much more. “She was totally a rebel,” said Emilia Schule (shown here), who stars in the eight-part “Marie Antoinette,” debuting at 10 p.m. Sunday (March 19) on PBS.
In the glittery Versailles palace, Marie was a rule-breaker — something Schule sort of understands.
Some scenes were shot in an awesome Versailles hallway, a 240-foot expanse with 357 mirrors. Catch it most days, Schule said, and you have a room packed with “people with selfie sticks.” But then there were Mondays – the one day the Versailles is closed to visitors and the film crew is welcome.
“It is just a magical place,” Schule said. “And I did break the rules.”
She couldn’t resist sitting on a Versailles sofa, which was forbidden. Marie would have understood.
That pattern – shooting Mondays at Versailles and other days in movie sets re-creating the palace – brought complications. Louis Cunningham – who played Marie’s reluctant husband – was doing a horseback scene, when it was time for the meal break. “I was like, ‘I’ll ride the horse back,’” he recalled. “Little did I know that the gardens are still open to the public on Mondays. So suddenly, I’m kind of riding through these waves of tourists, dressed as Louis XVI.”
In theory, Cunningham was neatly suited for the role. He’s the son of a Luxembourg princess; he’s an Oxford grad and virtually his only screen experience was in “Bridgerton,” as a rejected suitor.
Still, he says, he didn’t bring any special royal training. Like the others, he had to learn the palace ways from scratch. “We had a couple of sessions around etiquette and stuff.”
In other ways, it is Schule whose life prepared her for this project.
Marie Antoinette was thrust into unfamiliar worlds. An Austrian teen who loved dolls and music, she was sent to France at 14. “She leaves her mum and is sent away to marry some guy she’s never seen before,” Schule said, “and is supposed to consummate something that no one ever explained to her.”
(Nor did Louis seem prepared. It reportedly took him seven years to consummate the marriage.)
This notion — being thrust into different worlds – is familiar to Schule. She grew up in Germany, landed her first movie role at 15, won a “best young actress” award in Germany at 21 and has worked steadily in both German- and English-language roles.
A decade ago, an American-style audition — with a casting person flatly reading the other character’s lines – was perplexing to her. “That was so different from the way I was used to,” she said. And transforming into Marie Antoinette was an adventure.
“This part was overwhelming,” Schule said; “But … I like to get overwhelmed and confront my fear.”
In “Wonderschoen” – a movie about beauty and self-image –she was playing a model who shaved her head. That’s when she was asked to audition by Zoom for Marie. “I was terrified and I had no hair.”
For a second Zoom audition, she did borrow a period-piece dress. Still, she had that shaved head, as she tried to seem like one of history’s most elaborately coiffed and dressed people.
Then she got the role and was squeezed into the wardrobe. “As soon as you’re in that corset, you really feel in a cage and you have to adapt to a completely new way of existence.”
This was Marie’s caged existence. People saw her, Schule said, as “an ‘it’ girl and a luxury girl. But she was much more complex than that and much more modern …. She always stood up for herself.”
She brought a fresh face to royalty; the masses loved her, then hated an guillotined her. She lived a rebellious life; maybe she even sat on a forbidden sofa.