Helen Mirren makes for a thrilling Catherine the Great. In the upcoming, eponymous HBO miniseries, the Oscar winner plays the 18th-century Russian leader with ruthless panache, cutting down all the men attempting to usurp her throne. “It would be a terrible mistake to go against me,“ she warns in the trailer above. The project was apparently kick-started when Mirren said in an interview that she would one day like to play the monarch, who ruled during Russia’s Golden Era and had a notoriously rocky marriage to Peter III. Producers David Thompson and Charles Pattinson heard the word and quickly made it so. Now Mirren hopes the four-part miniseries will help people see Catherine in a new light. “History doesn’t like very successful, very powerful women,” Mirren told the Independent. “They have to drag them down, and history tried to drag Catherine down. I hope we are going to reinstate her reputation as the incredible leader that she was.” “I’m not saying she didn’t have her faults,” the actor added. “She made mistakes, and finished up quite tyrannical. But she was originally a reformer and a Westernizer, if you like, of this vast, vast country.” The four-part series also stars Jason Clarke as Grigory Potemkin, the military commander who became Catherine’s lover. Catherine the Great will debut on October 21 at 10 p.m. on HBO.

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