Laura Haddock - Lucrezia Donati

ASSIGNMENT X: Was Lucrezia Donati a real person?

LAURA HADDOCK: Yes, she existed. She was a celebrated beauty of Florence at the time. We don’t know if she had this affair with Lorenzo de Medici, we’ve taken lots of liberties, but she was certainly around at the time. He’s the kind of person that would have wanted to have been in a relationship with someone like her.

AX: Were you as surprised as the audience was to find out who her father is? Or did you know that going in?

HADDOCK: Hmm-hmm. I don’t think I knew at the beginning. I found out before the audience did, obviously [laughs], but yeah. This season, I got to go back in time and play her when she was about sixteen, seventeen, and I got to physically play out what happened to her at that age and this thing happened to her, and you don’t wish it on anybody. And so I started to realize who this woman was, and why she was the way she was, and she’s desperately trying to avenge this thing that’s happened and doing what she thinks is right.

AX: Do you have to do anything differently to play Lucrezia when she’s seventeen?

HADDOCK: Well, there was a lot of concealer involved [laughs], and I think my makeup call was about four hours or something like that. Costuming and makeup I think really helped with all of that. The cuts were different, there was no need to make the dresses cut so that you were expressing your femininity in any way. She was a young lady, a young girl.

It was completely invaluable, actually, playing her in Episode Four of this season, because I got to go back and play her happy and light and free of any trauma and hurt and pain and grief. So it was really interesting to see her as a young woman and I felt like she was free and life was ahead of her and she had so much to look forward to, and then this thing happened. Literally, in the scene, I felt like the barriers came down and she became closed off to everything other than avenging what just happened. She knew quickly that was what her role in life was going to be, was to avenge that moment.

It certainly helped for the rest of the second season, and it kind of set my mind at ease about choices that I’d made in the first season. Physically going through that, having the emotional memory of that scene, physically witnessing in front of my eyes what happened and then taking that into the rest of the season was very helpful.

AX: And do you play her any differently when she appears in Da Vinci’s mind versus when she’s really there?

HADDOCK: We had this discussion whether or not his vision of her was different to who she really is. But we decided that you just have to play it for real. When you’re given the text, you just play it for real. So whether it’s dream or reality, you just kind of go with the text.

AX: When you started playing Lucrezia, at that time, you didn’t yet know her back story. Why did you think she was doing what she was doing?

HADDOCK: Well, as always, there’s a fear that you’re making big choices and they’re not going to be the right choices once you’ve read where your character is going in Season 2, but what’s brilliant about David is, he’s got the whole thing mapped out in his head, and he knew very early on that something had happened to her in her life. We didn’t know the absolute specifics, but we certainly knew that whatever happened was huge and going to affect her in a huge emotional way. And so in Episode Four [of Season 2], we find out all these links, we find out all the different relationships between people, blood ties and people that you already know.