Reign (CW / Rai 2)

POP! A celebratory toast begins the fashion shoot with the cast of The CW’s new drama Reign, and the actors are feeling the excitement. “This is weird in the most wonderful way,” says Adelaide Kane, dancing in a suite at The New York Palace hotel. The starlet steps into a Dolce & Gabbana outfit and puts on a set of outrageously heavy earrings. The series is only four days away from its network debut and its royal trinity of stars—Kane, Toby Regbo and Torrance Coombs—is in New York for Comic Con, the sci-fi and comics convention, where the cast got its first taste of audience affection in the long road from casting a pilot to airing the premiere. Months of hard work and the hopes of several careers are bound up in the weekly drama about teenage Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, in the court of France on the eve of her wedding. But the Comic Con fans were ecstatic, so the troika is celebrating.
“It’s the closest thing I’ve experienced to being onstage, getting to feel an audience’s immediate reaction,” says Regbo, who made his stage debut at London’s Royal Court Theatre when he was 17 and now stars as Prince Francis on The CW’s drama.
Reign is part fantasy, part history and all imperial drama. To amp up the heat, producers turned a historical romance into a love triangle, giving Francis an illegitimate half-brother, Bash, played by Coombs, who competes for Mary’s admiration and the attention of his father, the king of France.
[...] A reporter can’t help but ask: Did any of the onscreen romances erupt into their personal lives? “Actors are notorious for sleeping with co-stars and it causes a lot of trouble,” says Kane. “But everyone in this cast is attached, in serious committed relationships, and it makes everyone relaxed.”
Having sweethearts back home inoculates the cast against steamy gossip fodder (and heartbreaks), but the awkwardness of love, rejection and adolescent peer pressure is front and center in the script. “Do I fit in? What should I do with my life? The characters in Reign are having those same anxieties on the screen,” says Coombs. “At some point [in my teens], I became afraid to be ridiculous in public; I felt like I had to cast it away and have everyone think I was cool.”
Filming Reign has been liberating in other ways as well: “I just did the first nude scene of my career,” says Regbo. “They give you a little drawstring bag, called a modesty sack. It was anything but.”