A new big-budget TV series being filmed here, featuring sex, corruption and violence at the Vatican, isn't expected to cause more than a ripple in the sex scandal-plagued Catholic Church.
The Borgias, a $45-million, Canadian-Irish-Hungarian series starring Oscar winner Jeremy Irons, centres around history's most notorious pope.
Rodrigo Borgia, who deployed bribery to become Pope Alexander VI in 1492, was famous for his voracious sexual appetite, corruption, and use of violence to try to ensure a dynasty for his out-of-wedlock children.
"My hunch would be that, having lived through The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, the Vatican won't be terribly shocked by a movie on the Borgias," according to John Allen, the Vatican correspondent for CNN and the National Catholic Reporter.
Oxford University professor Diarmaid MacCulloch noted Wednesday that the upcoming series, to be broadcast next spring in the U.S. on Showtime and in Canada on CTV and the Bravo channel, is far from the first time the notorious Borgia family has been portrayed in popular culture.
The Borgia family was the inspiration for novelist Mario Puzo's The Godfather, and has prompted numerous films, TV series, books, and even video games.
"I think that the Vatican would be fairly blase about a TV series about the Borgias," MacCulloch told Postmedia News in an email.
An official in the Vatican press office refused to comment.
Producer James Flynn, interviewed on the set at a massive studio here in Hungary's wine country, about 30 kilometres outside Budapest, said the project — the brainchild of Oscar-winning Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan —_probably would have been controversial in the recent past.
"I think people have moved on," Flynn, who is also Irish, told Postmedia News.
"I think 15 years ago, yes, in Ireland, there would have been people who would be outraged, because the Catholic Church (before recent exposure of widespread sex abuse in Ireland) was held in such high regard.
"Today I think they'll probably ignore it."
Flynn said The Borgias could, however, benefit from the Vatican's current high media profile due to increased public curiosity about the institution.
"In some sense, it could help," he said.
"There is the simple question of what actually goes on at the Vatican? There is a bank, there are employees. There must be politics at the Vatican. How do you elect the pope? That's all covered."
Showtime acquired The Borgias to fill the void left by The Tudors, a successful Canadian-Irish-British production loosely based on the life of Henry VIII and based in the same time period as The Borgias.
The Tudors completed its fourth and final season last spring.
The Borgias has a strong Canadian element, with veteran actor Colm Feore playing Alexander's archrival, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. Montreal actor Francois Arnaud plays Cesare, while Canadian Jeremy Podeswa directs several of the episodes.
British actor Holliday Grainger, who plays Alexander VI's daughter Lucrezia, said it never occurred to her that the series could gain added attention due to the sex-abuse scandal.
But Grainger, whose character is engaged in several sexual relationships and is violently raped by her first husband, said her only concern is about her grandfathers — one an Italian Catholic, the other an Irish Catholic.
"I don't know how they're going to handle it."
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