An old king stands alone in a snowy yard with his white hair spilling over a coat of scale armor, his head thrown back and one hand raised toward the sky, while his sword hangs point down at his side. That is Harald Fairhair (Jesper Christensen), the first king of all Norway, and his is one of ten first look images Prime Video released on October 5th for “Bloodaxe”, the new Norse saga from “Vikings” creator Michael Hirst and his son Horatio Hirst. It is a strange picture to find in a set meant to sell a young man with an axe. It might also be the most important one, since Entertainment Weekly reports that the old king’s failing health is what sets the whole first season in motion.
The Hirsts are the showrunners, and they wrote the series together. Prime Video says all eight episodes of season one will premiere in 2027 in more than 240 countries and territories. A second season is already in production in Ireland. The story follows Erik Bloodaxe (Xavier Molyneux) and his wife Gunnhild, Mother of Kings (Jessica Madsen), who fight for the throne of Norway while, in the words of the official logline, “the land is torn apart by fierce rivals, shifting loyalties, and bloody betrayals.” Levi Miller, Karlis Arnolds Avots, Rod Hallett, Alina Tomnikov, Sisse Marie and Rune Temte round out the cast. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the real history behind “Bloodaxe”, which the sagas wrote down centuries ago.
An old king stands alone in a snowy yard with his white hair spilling over a coat of scale armor, his head thrown back and one hand raised toward the sky, while his sword hangs point down at his side.”
Erik gets four of the ten frames, and they cover a lot of ground. In one he stands in a smoky village in a chain mail hood, roaring with an axe raised over his head. In another he leads a charge across a misty field with white paint smeared over his face and beard, a whole war band screaming behind him, the shield maiden Greta (Alina Tomnikov) among them. A third puts him on a wooden staircase above a crowd, wrapped in black fur and hung with chains, with pale blue and gold banners on either side. Molyneux told EW the name alone “carries this viciousness,” and that the first time we see Erik, “He’s a goddamn butcher.” The axe, he added, has “the spike at the back, as well.”
The fourth frame is the one that explains the show. Erik and Gunnhild lean in to kiss in the middle of a packed, firelit hall, with children and a braided shield maiden in the foreground and gray-bearded elders cheering behind them. Horatio Hirst told EW that “We’ve always called them the medieval Bonnie and Clyde,” and Michael added that “They had to be charismatic in order to do what they did.” Erik calls her “the other half of my sky,” a line EW traces to John Lennon’s “Woman”, and Michael admits he likes to “squeeze a little bit of John Lennon into most of my scripts.” Madsen, who spent years as Cressida Cowper in “Bridgerton”, joked that “I feel like I do less side eyes” now.
Her solo image is the best of the set. Gunnhild stands at the top of a wooden stair, visibly pregnant, holding a round painted shield, with two carved and gilded beast heads rising on either side of her and two armed men standing guard below. EW describes her there as pregnant “with her next son,” a detail that lands for anyone who knows why the sagas called her the Mother of Kings. Her parents get a frame too, with Gorm (Rune Temte) and Thyra (Sisse Marie), the king and queen of Denmark, posed side by side on a boardwalk in red velvet and heavy fox fur.
Erik’s main rival is his younger half-brother, Haakon the Good (Levi Miller), and his two frames are dressed in a different key. On a beach he wears a long embroidered cloak with longships moored behind him, and on a ridge he sits a horse in gold armor among soldiers whose shields bear crosses, and that is the point. EW reports that Harald sent Haakon to England as a boy to learn from Athelstan, King of Wessex (Rod Hallett). He converted to Christianity there, so the fight for the throne looks set to double as a fight between the old gods and the new church. Then there is Egil (Karlis Arnolds Avots), who leads a war band through the woods under a heavy prosthetic brow. Deadline’s casting notice called him “a poet, farmer, murderer, sorcerer, ladies’ man, and a bit of a psychopath,” and EW says the makeup reflects a theory that the real Egil had Paget’s disease.
A lot of the craft comes from the old show. EW’s set visit found the series filling most of the stages at Ashford Studios in Wicklow, Ireland, where Harald’s great hall has walls that curve up like a ribcage. Production designer Tom Conroy, costume designer Susan O’Connor Cave, prosthetics chief Tom McInerney and marine advisor Alistair Rumball all came back from “Vikings”. The idea itself came from Arturo Interian, an executive producer on “Vikings”. Hirst admits he was not sure he was “quite up to it,” because he had written all 89 episodes of that show and “it nearly killed me.” He kept an executive producer credit on Netflix’s “Vikings: Valhalla” but says he “had nothing to do” with it. Horatio, who played Bishop Grimketel in four episodes of “Valhalla”, gets his first writing credit here.
The more interesting move is the one Amazon made in June. Deadline reported on June 16th that Prime Video had ordered a second season before the first had aired, with Hirst saying cameras would roll in Ireland within a few weeks. EW says season one wrapped last November, post-production was done by July, and the team was back on set by August. MGM Television made “Vikings” for History and “Valhalla” for Netflix. It is now part of Amazon MGM Studios, so this time the studio and the streamer are one company. Our read is that keeping a trained crew and a full set of stages warm in Wicklow is probably cheaper than breaking it all down and hiring it back a year later. The risk is that Amazon is now two seasons deep in a show nobody has watched.
The history gives Hirst plenty to work with. According to Britannica and Wikipedia’s account of the sources, the real Erik held the Norwegian throne only briefly in the 930s. The sagas usually explain his nickname by his killing of his half-brothers, though its true origin is uncertain. Haakon followed him on the Norwegian throne, and Erik turned up later as king of Northumbria at York, twice, before he was killed at Stainmore in 954. Britannica notes that the line of Norse kings at York ended with him. Gunnhild is harder to pin down. She is known mostly from the Icelandic sagas, which credit her with magic and make her the mother of later kings. Egil’s own saga even has him buying his life from Erik in England with a poem.
Hirst already knows where that leaves him. “They go to Orkney, they go to York, they go to Ireland,” he told EW about the couple. “We have a lot of stories to tell.” The series sits decades after “Vikings” and decades before “Valhalla”, and in his statement on the renewal he promised magic realism “in an effort to induct the audience into a Viking mind-set.” That is likely the riskiest idea in the package, and no still can show it. What the stills do show is a production that looks expensive, cold and lived in.
What Do You Think? Does a gold-armored Christian Haakon make you root for him or for Erik? Is Amazon right to order a second season before the first one airs? And do you want magic realism in a Hirst Viking saga, or should the gods stay in the sagas?
See you on the next binge!
