The White Queen: Behind the scenes at the BBC's summer blockbuster She says the cast were glued to events unfolding in Leicester as filming continued, when the skeleton found beneath a council car park turned out to be that of Richard III. "It was so weird," she says. We were all talking about it, and getting pictures on our phones, making Aneurin stand still, so we could compare him to the real Richard. One immediately noticeable difference is that the makers elected to follow Gregory and cast Richard without a hunchback. Is that a problem? "Well if we were being 100 per cent historically accurate," says Ferguson, "I would have been plucking my hair back to the top of my head, because the longer the forehead, the more regal you were. So I think we're making it more touchable for the audience. The first episode turns on Edward's desire for Elizabeth. How did she go about playing the sexiness of that? "It's a love story between two people," she says, "a girl and a boy that today would be wearing jeans." In the aftermath of lots of big US cable dramas, however, such as Game of Thrones and The Borgias, and even UK series such as The Tudors, you might expect that the drama will be driven by copious sex and violence. In fact, the production eschews battle scenes - they happen off screen - to focus on the complex, shifting allegiances and power plays of the main characters, all seen, as they are in Gregory's book, through the eyes of women at the centre of the struggle for power. As for sex, "there won't be lots of it," says producer Gina Cronk, "but there will be some. Part of the contemporary critique of her at the time is that she was a bit wanton. She was very sensuous at a time when the Church was in the ascendancy and the feeling was that you had sex to have children. Sex also inevitably takes us into territory that is at odds with the standards of our time. Newcomer Faye Marsay plays Anne Neville, the daughter of a nobleman, later the tragic queen of Richard III, who is married off at 13 to Edward of Lancaster to forge a political alliance. This Edward is from the other side of the Plantagenet divide to Edward IV. Though Marsay is 25, her character is not. How did she respond when she saw there were sex scenes in the script? "I looked at them and went, "wow,"" says Marsay, "because it's my first job and I've never done them before but it's important to the story. There's a wedding night scene, but Edward doesn't care about Anne at all and he's really barbaric in the act. His mother comes in as well, which is a bit creepy but in those days it was the done thing, she lays a cloth down so she can tell that the marriage has been consummated. Was it more stressful because of modern sensibilities about the age of the character? Yes, I think so, but that was how it was done in those days. We've just shot a wedding reception for a six and a seven year old" - this is the scene I've just seen filmed - "It's all about the politics behind it, it's never for love - they don't care how old you are." On the other side of the conflict is Gregory's "Red Queen" Margaret Beaufort (played by Amanda Hale), who was also married off as a child and had a son, Henry Tudor, at 14. She believes she has had a vision that he will one day be king. In fact, belief in divine intervention pervades the drama. "It's a belief system," says Gina Cronk. There are no magical special effects. It's not Merlin or Harry Potter. "It wasn't seen as esoteric in that world, it was integral," says Hale. Every court had an astrologer. The outcomes of the battles were signs from God. Hale is clearly a student of the period and the real Margaret Beaufort. "She feels like a character from Dostoevsky, with her sense of a divine purpose in life," she says. Joan of Arc was so recent in her time, only 20 years before this, her legend was still so hot... Margaret thought she was going to be a saint as a child, and as she ages, it becomes clear it's not going to happen. It all gets invested in her son then. She's terrified and obsessed - terrified that God isn't on her side. Part of me admires her - these are the people who do change the world, and she did influence the course of history by being so hellbent on getting her son on the throne. Her singlemindedness finds an echo in Hale's own background. She grew up on a council estate in north London. She hadn't acted in anything until she took her A-Levels and went on a theatre trip, and suddenly realised that the actors were "real people doing it as a job." She'd been offered a place at Oxford but decided to apply to drama school instead. She got in everywhere except where she wanted to go - Rada. They finally accepted her the fourth time she tried. Since then she has achieved stage success and had notable roles in The Crimson Petal and the White and Ripper Street. "I've hardly been out of a bodice since I started," she laughs. Her provenance is rather different from that of Max Irons, who plays King Edward IV. Irons is the son of acting royalty, his father is Jeremy Irons, his mother Sinead Cusack, and he seemed on the verge of a Hollywood career with roles in films such as The Host, but turned his back on it for the chance to play a character he could get his teeth into. "Edward was actually exiled here in Bruges," Irons says. We were in a place the other day that was an ancient centre of Catholicism, so it's more than likely that he would have stood in that place and I find that exciting. He's been enjoying the medieval city's strange ambience. I walk around in my costume sometimes. We can walk over and get a sandwich and no one does a double take. I'm like, I've got a huge gold sword and... "Thanks for my change." It's really weird. Bruges was chosen because it has so many medieval buildings, interiors and streets. "There are still medieval pockets in the UK - some in York, some in Chester," says Gina Cronk, "but if you want to follow the comings and goings, you might have to shoot in one city, cut and pick the scene up in another. Coming here we could follow the characters out of one house and along the street on their way to another. It's a world in which the women are manipulating and using their power as best they could to influence events. I ask James Frain, who plays the powerful Earl of Warwick - "the Kingmaker" - in the drama if he thinks it will be difficult to get that across to a modern audience. I wonder how far we've got really. I mean look at Italy and the status of women and that's a modern European country. Look at our country and women don't have equal pay, look at the Houses of Parliament and women are very much in the minority. They are allowed to own land but men still run the show. We still have the best jobs, we still pay ourselves more, we might congratulate ourselves on being better than people in the Middle Ages but we're not there yet. The White Queen begins on BBC One in June.