Samantha Morton doesn’t just break the fourth wall—she obliterates it, raises a toast to the wreckage, and scores it with a PJ Harvey deep cut.
With Season 2 of The Serpent Queen now out in the wild, Morton returns to the throne as Catherine de' Medici, the Italian-born queen who ruled France like Machiavelli in pearls. The show, a sharp, bloody, and darkly comic historical drama, has found its sweet spot by being many things at once: feminist without being preachy, funny without being camp, and, as Morton puts it, “contemporary but not trying too hard.”
“This isn’t just a costume drama,” she says. “It’s like Succession with corsets. It’s brutal and it's clever, and we’re not dumbing anything down.”
Catherine’s motivations are, like any great character—or any world leader—deliciously complicated. “Her children are her weakness and her weapon,” Morton explains. “But France is her baby too. She wants peace, a secular state, no religious war. That’s radical in a Catholic country in the 1500s. She’s playing the long game. She has to pretend to be stupid so she’s not killed for being smart.”
Morton delivers that intelligence with a sly wink at the audience—literally. Catherine regularly stares straight into the camera to share her real thoughts while the court obliviously plots in the background. It’s a move that Morton relishes. “It’s like Choose Your Own Adventure meets Fleabag,” she says. “You get to do the scene, then turn to camera and say, ‘I didn’t want to do that, but I had to.’ It brings the audience in.”
But Morton’s artistic world doesn’t end in 16th-century France. She’s also released one of the year’s most quietly devastating albums: Daffodils & Dirt, her debut under the name Sam Morton. Written and produced with XL’s Richard Russell, the album is woozy, wounded, and as emotionally layered as any of her performances. Think Kid A at closing time with dream-pop hangover and cassette static.
“Richard called me after I did Desert Island Discs,” she says. “He wanted to sample my voice. Two hours later, we were talking about our childhoods and musical influences, and then somehow… we were making a record.”
Morton’s history with music goes back to her rave days in Nottingham, singing for bedroom producers before becoming one of the UK’s most respected actors. “I’ve had 35 years of poems and songs stored up,” she says. “This wasn’t some late-career vanity project. It was a muscle that had been hungry for decades.”
Songs like “Purple Yellow” wrestle with generational trauma and her mother’s death from cancer. “Let’s Walk in the Night,” which you can hear on WFPK, sounds like a dream you had in 1992 and never fully woke up from. There’s a duet with Ali Campbell of UB40 that emerges out of nowhere and breaks your heart gently. She even directs all the music videos herself, which checks out—this is Samantha Morton we’re talking about. She doesn’t half-commit.
When asked if this is the start of something, she doesn’t hesitate. “I’m doing festivals. I’m supporting Kae Tempest. I’ve got a movie next, but then I’m back in the studio. I’m not done.”
She’s 47, but speaks like someone who’s just getting started. And in a way, she is. “Actors making music isn’t always taken seriously,” she says. “But the reviews have been kind. And I don’t read reviews—but I do hear things.”
And just like Catherine de’ Medici, she’s changing the game.
Watch the interview above and then check out the track and trailer below.
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