The Last Kingdom

They cast Uhtred in a London park while dog walkers stared.

Alexander Dreymon sent a self-tape from a Michigan indie set in 2014. Then a Skype test. Then London, in a park, with Emily Cox already cast as Brida and director Nick Murphy hiding them in the undergrowth. latestnetflix.com's view is that "We hid in the undergrowth and played scenes that ended up in the first season."People walked their dogs past the future Saxon-Dane.

Carnival Films, the Downton Abbey shop, needed every layer of NBCUniversal to sign off on the lead. Dreymon started reading Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories while he waited. He said keeping faith was hard.

BBC America premiered the eight-part run on October 10, 2015. BBC Two followed later that month. Stephen Butchard adapted. Gareth Neame and Nigel Marchant executive produced. The year on screen is 872. Wessex is the last English kingdom still standing against the Danes. Uhtred is a Saxon noble's son raised by Vikings, which is the whole identity problem in one sentence.

A documentary camera, then a lot of mud.

Murphy wanted the first two episodes shot "in an almost documentary style." No typical epic polish. His example was people talking about a divorce while doing the dishes. History, he argued, is made by people who do not know they are making it. A focus puller named Simon Heck had to guess the next move. Dreymon said they lost only two or three takes to focus across those episodes.

The accent was a long debate. Producers cast British actors as Saxons and Scandinavians as Danes. Uhtred had to sound like neither. Dreymon and a dialect coach built a British base with a Scandinavian twist, plus a rhythm that became the character's trademark. He was born in Germany and raised in France, Switzerland, and the United States. He has said that unrooted childhood is the part of Uhtred he did not have to invent.

Most of the "England" was Hungary. Seasons ran seven to eight months. Three of them, plus the later film, shot in winter. Battle days meant falling in mud and staying wet. "You're on location, so you can't just go in the building next door and kind of warm up."

Netflix took it, and the posters never came.

Netflix co-produced season 2 with BBC Two, then took the series from season 3. Dreymon told Vogue the viewership "really exploded" once that happened. The launch, he said, had been "very, very stealthily." The Ringer later noted Nielsen ranked the fifth season among 2022's most-watched original streaming series, ahead of The Rings of Power, with almost no awards-campaign muscle. Dreymon admitted he wished for posters on Sunset Boulevard. He also called the no-ad success "just wonderful."

The plan was five seasons, two Cornwell books each. Cornwell kept writing. The 2023 film Seven Kings Must Die adapted War Lord, which The Ringer reports Cornwell dedicated to Dreymon. Back in 2015, Dreymon told Variety he hoped the documentary texture would stop people from filing the show as the new Vikings or the new Game of Thrones. "Hopefully it will become a new thing on its own." The first trailer asked the only question the series ever needed. Saxon or Dane?

That is the gossip. A park, a focus puller, Hungarian mud, and a streamer that noticed after the BBC had already done the hard part.