"....The Musketeers 3.4...where has Bonnaire been all these years?" (SPOILER WARNING)

When we approached the wonderful James Callis about reprising the character of Bonnaire for us in Series III of The Musketeers, this was one of the first questions he asked.

After much discussion in the Writers' Room, our ever-amazing Executive Producer Jess Pope came up with an answer. Clearly James liked it enough to come back and hopefully you can sense a lot of this rich, wonderful history in the finished episode!

(NOTE: won't be able to blog for the next few weeks but look out for some BIG POSTS about the last EVER episode around July 30 !) 

Bonnaire Back Story - Episode Four

Six years after the Musketeers put him on a boat to Cadiz Emile Bonnaire is back in France but he hasn't, as we might have thought, returned from Spain; he never, in fact arrived there. Barely out of Le Havre he threw himself overboard in the middle of the night and swam back to the port where he instead took another packet to England. And he has been there ever since.

Arriving with nothing other than his wits and the clothes he stood up in he made his way to Oxford and found employment in the University of Oxford's Botanic Garden (Estab 1621) as a plantsman/apothecary where his knowledge and experience of the then rare and unknown equatorial flora and fauna made him something of a marvel and a local sensation. 

As a natural-born French gentleman his name eventually came to the attention of the French Queen, Henrietta Maria, wife to Charles I who never really mastered English as a language. And thus Emile settled into a relatively humble but comfortable life on the fringes of the Royal Household. He met and married a young woman, Caroline, a minor servant in the Queen's household, not high born but bright and a favourite of the Queen's. 

Emile bewitched her with his tales of white sand beaches and an island paradise 'out there' beyond the English rain and it became their private impossible dream - that if they ever had the chance to make it a reality they would grab the opportunity with both hands and run off to a new adventure together on the other side of the world.

When Henrietta decided to sell her jewels in Paris and asked Caroline to accompany her in utmost secrecy,  it was that chance. And Emile, after five years as an 'honest' man and with Caroline's blessing and collusion, broke bad again.....

"....The Musketeers 3.3 deleted scenes!" (SPOILER WARNING)

For those who've watched The Musketeers Episode Three 'Brothers in Arms' this might be interesting (or it might not!)

In the aftermath of the Red Guard's climactic attack on Christophe's Tavern, we had a scene where Constance returns to the Garrison with Brujon and her other cadets.

Marcheaux, still furious from his defeat, waits until Constance is alone and then tries to attack her only for our brilliant Chatelaine of the Garrison to outwit him once more.

We filmed this scene and for a long time it was in the finished episode. Both Tamla and Matt were amazing but we ended up cutting it because we felt Constance had already enjoyed a triumphant moment over Marcheaux ('You're no man, are you?') in the earlier scene.

Another scene we filmed but decided to remove in the early edit was a late moment between Christophe and Sylvie, where he's decided to turn his grief into something positive...

"....fly posters from the set of The Musketeers 3.2."

Episode Two of The Musketeers Series Three introduces brand new character Sylvie (played by the wonderful Thalissa Teixeira), a woman who's seeking refuge from the war in the slums of Paris. One of the things we wanted to do in this final season was to make Paris itself feel like a character. A fully-fleshed out, lived-in, troubled crucible of social unrest. To that end our BRILLIANT Production Designer Dave Arrowsmith extended our existing Paris set by as much as a third and his breathtaking attention to detail even went as far as plastering whole walls of the Slum with hundreds of these pamphlets and tributes to various Saints:

See if you can spot any in the finished episode!