King Henry VIII

Young, restless, and impatient with the men who counsel caution, this Henry inherits a throne he intends to make glorious. He jousts, hunts, and charms his court with the appetite of a man who has never been told no, while beneath the pageantry sits a mounting hunger for a son and a legacy that will outlast him.

The Tudors deliberately strips away the fat, bearded tyrant of popular imagination and gives us Henry as a virile young athlete, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays him with a coiled, brooding volatility — charm curdling into menace in a single scene — that makes his growing appetite for power feel dangerous from the very first episode.