Bizarre casting choices

I kinda agree on the part about Henry in his fifties being played by a fit actor in his thirties.

As for Anne of Cleves/Joss Stone, if you take a look at the Holbein portrait of the real Anne, she was actually pretty and although there probably was artistic liberty playing into that portrait, I always took the casting of this role as showing that she was only unattractive to Henry. Real life Henry didn't like her from the start after she didn't get his little 'I'll just walk in there in disguise and she'll know it's me and it'll be all romantic'-play and hurt his ego.
As for Catherine Howard/Tamzin Merchant, she wasn't supposed to be a bombshell. The real Catherine wasn't one either. Henry fell for the ingenue he saw her as, calling her the rose without a thorn and all that. I think Tamzin looks the teen bride part.

The bozo, I guess, is the Earl of Surrey? He does have a tendency to look funny when saying his lines, but I'm no native English speaker, so I can't say much about the accuracy of his manner of speaking.

I agree re all but the one guy with the funny voice - don't remember him!

I even checked the credits for who played the teeny-bopper queen. Can't find note of any family ties online, but her surname of "Merchant" made me suspicious about her having landed the role. And I was SO looking forward to this "chapter!" Could have been a lot of fun.

As I recall, it wasn't just Henry who found Anne of Cleve's less than "comely." Other men struggled to conceal winces upon seeing her, as I recall.

I think it was probably a good idea to have made Henry look as young and relatively fit in his later years as they did - fictitious though this was. I, for one, may otherwise have lost interest. But I agree, as I said, that his appearance certainly flies in the face of history!

I was wondering the same thing. Some of the casting choices are very distracting. I hated Catherine Howard. The actress is extremely ugly. I don't think I've ever been as bothered by the casting choices as I have been on this show.

Why cast a very attractive woman and have her described as looking "like a horse"?

Cocktail weenie--do you mean Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey? That casting bothered me too. An Irishman, complete with Irish accent? WTF! Not to mention Howard was one of the founding fathers of English Renaissance poetry, and he comes off like a dumb ass. I know the Earl was historically a hell raiser, but they surely could have put that across without making him seem like an idiotic jock.

Does anyone know if Henry actually later visited, and slept with, her? Perhaps this was merely a plot device to make him look "wiser in his old(er) age."

While I understand some of the frustration some people feel over the casting choices, I also kind of feel like we're splitting hairs.

There are (obviously) no photos of any of the historical people that are being depicted in this show. Yes there are portraits and written accounts of what these people looked like but demanding that the casting people find actors and actresses in the 21st century who look 99.9% like people who existed over 400 years ago is asking a little much. It's cool if you disagree with an actor that was chosen to play a certain character, but since we don't have 100% perfect records of how these people looked, everyone comes up with a different mental image.

Plus not all the actors are exact age/height/weight/nationality of the people they are portraying, and I don't think that's a completely bad thing.

As far as how they dealt with Henry VIII going through the aging process. . . .keep in mind that this show is trying to depict roughly 30-40 years of history in roughly less than 40 episodes. Everything has been sped up; one episode will often include events that happened over the course of a year. Maybe it was too expensive to go through all the necessary trouble to show Henry go from an active young man to an overweight old man.

There's actually A LOT of details about this show that the makers took liberties with (accents, the use of certain languages, speech patterns, costumes, even the time and place when certain things actually happened in history) but I think splitting hairs over that stuff makes you miss the bigger picture.

Try not to sweat the small stuff.

I agree completely about them not aging Henry when he was older, he was supposed to be quite heavy and smelled bad because of his infected leg. He also had gout because of his diet.

Some of the things I read about Anne Cleaves, was that Henry preferred more petite women, and Anne was larger and more curvy, which was actually considered more attractive in that day, but Henry liked them smaller. But he did make her his "sister" and they became friends and she lived the longest of all his wives and even died with her head still attached lol.

I didn't like the Catherine Howard casting, there was something more creepy than light about her. I think Anne Boleyn was perfect casting, as well as Catherine of Aragon, Katherine Parr wasn't on long enough to really make much of an impression.