Watch the First PBS Trailer for ‘Wolf Hall’ Coming In April

The highly anticipated television adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies) is set to air on Masterpiece this April and PBS has released its first teaser trailer for the Tudor-era drama.

The six-part series follows the meteoric rise of Thomas Cromwell, a lowly blacksmith’s son who eventually became one of the most powerful men in England as chief advisor to King Henry VIII. Cromwell was one of the primary architects of the English Reformation and helped to engineer the dissolution of Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon so that he could marry his mistress Anne Boleyn.

Tony and Olivier Award-winning actor Mark Rylance stars as Cromwell, along with Homeland’s Damian Lewis, Upstairs Downstairs’ Claire Foy, Call the Midwife’s Jessica Raine, Sherlock’s Mark Gatiss, Jonathan Pryce and more. (Yeah, the cast for this is pretty amazing, right?)  

Watch the first PBS teaser for yourselves below: 

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I think my favorite thing about this teaser, besides the fact that it’s very different from the BBC Two clip that preceded the drama’s UK premiere, is that it’s so dark and ominous, and clearly has zero qualms about painting Henry Tudor as a sort of megalomaniacal, bullying jerk. (This is a twist, which, on the face of it, does seem to be quite historically accurate a not insignificant part of the time.)

It’s also interesting that this US teaser plays up Lewis and King Henry VIII a great deal more than it does Cromwell or Rylance, particularly when the focus of Mantel’s two novels (soon to be trilogy whenever The Mirror and the Light gets finished) is firmly placed on the former Lord Great Chamberlain of England.  (This is what makes her books so interesting, truthfully, it’s a very uncommon portray of – and frankly, focus on – Cromwell.)

This may be just a familiarity issue – US audiences are probably a lot less knowledgeable about Cromwell’s identity or role during Henry’s reign than they are about the fact that Henry had one – but it’s nevertheless interesting from a marketing perspective, when all signs point to Cromwell’s character as being the driver of this story.

Nevertheless, I am basically sick with excitement over this show. I loved the books and can’t wait to see how it plays out on the small screen.

How about you? Wolf Hall premieres on Masterpiece beginning Sunday, April 5.