A rush for royalty

The book "sells in Korea, Brazil. It sells in Russia. It's clearly selling beyond Anglo-Saxon borders," says the 54-year-old British author Gregory, on the phone from Dallas, where she's touring in advance of the movie. "It's the story of people who are generally very disadvantaged. It's a dramatization and exaggeration of the difficulty in a woman's life. The women who Henry married are marrying a man who is both a man and incredibly powerful, and he is also slowly turning into a tyrant."

"Each generation enjoys the relevance and enjoys the opportunity to retell the story," says Bana. "They're probably fascinated by how little things have changed, in terms of people at the center of power who don't have in place a system of checks and balances that [tells them] when enough is enough. [They] can get out of control. We see that every day in society. Henry VIII is probably the most extreme example of that."

This said, this Henry VIII isn't, as director Justin Chadwick says, "a caricature with the chicken drumsticky thing with Henry that we know from history books." This is young, sexy Henry who can make girls swoon with his own unbridled brio, rather than just his position.

Yet one of the conundrums of history is how Anne Boleyn kept Henry's interest for seven long years without sleeping with him. "In the early days of the relationship, they had this incredible bond together," says Chadwick, best known for his miniseries "Bleak House," which aired on PBS. "She challenged him intellectually, culturally, politically. That's absolutely what kept Henry obsessed with this woman."

Bana admits he had a tough time relating to how the monarch refrained from carnal relations with his beloved for so long. Yet Bana used his imagination. "I always saw him as a 12-year-old when it came to the passions of love that he had for some of these women. I tried to use that a lot in terms of justifying his behavior. If you look at him as a crazy 12-year-old with a sensational crush, it becomes easier to swallow."

Despite the book having been published in 2001, this is actually the second screen version of Gregory's tale, the first a bare-bones BBC production where the filmmakers used a hand-held camera to give the story a contemporary feel and the actors improvised. "It was so low-budget, if you look carefully you'll see there is one dress which everybody [in the cast] wears at different times," says Gregory with a laugh.