First Genesis LAMDA Scholar in new BBC TV series

Samuel Barnet, who was awarded the first ever Genesis LAMDA scholarship (LAMDA Genesis Scholar of 2001), portrays painter John Everett Millais in a new BBC-originated series called Desperate Romantics. This six-part drama (Tuesdays, from 21 July 2009, on BBC 2 and BBC HD) follows the careers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a vagabond group of English artists who emerged in England in the mid-19th century.

The series dramatizes the struggles in the lives of William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and critic John Ruskin who was one of their first supporters and claimed they were the creators of a new British School of painting. The shows also tell the stories of the women who inspired these men. The scandalous lives of the painters have a relationship to English art that is notionally similar to what the Impressionists were to the French. Concentrating on their iconoclasm and anti-establishment attitudes, the brotherhood is portrayed in the series, according to art critic Brian Sewell, “as overgrown adolescents turning into men, exchanging mistresses, stealing a wife, playing Pygmalion to a cockney girl and driving poor Lizzie Siddal, their shared model, mistress and wife, to take an overdoes of laudanum.” It’s essentially a TV soap opera with excellent visuals!

The ambitious young pre-Raphaelites set out to rock the art world with a style of painting that was - according to them - more true, real and heartfelt than anything seen for 300 years. Unfortunately, the art world of their times wasn’t much interested in these “punk” iconoclasts, claiming they did not even know how to paint. Their credo was to return the art of painting to where it had gone wrong in Florence in the 15th century – getting rid of everything from Raphael onwards and starting again. They also believed in painting directly from Nature as Ruskin claimed they should: “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing”. Charles Dickens thought they were “mean, odious, revolting and repulsive”.

Samuel Barnett, who plays Millais, was born in 1980 and raised in Whitby, in North Yorkshire, England. He started performing at an early age then studied acting at LAMDA in London. He appeared in the original London stage production of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, acting in it in New York, Sydney, Wellington and Hong Kong as well as taking part in the film. He was nominated for an Olivier Award as well as a Tony Award for this role and won a 2006 Drama Desk Award in New York. Other credits include playing the role of Paul in the film Mrs Henderson Presents (2005), Wilfred Owen in the TV series Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale (BBC, 2007) as well as the role of Thomas Adams in the hugely successful HBO TV series John Adams (2008).