The Liverpool Echo has posted more photos from yesterday's Empire Awards; while several online publications have shared stills from Da Vinci's Demons accompanied by a press release / article about the show, which also has a brief interview with David S. Goyer. The Boston Herald is one of them.
To play this extraordinary chap, Goyer chose English-born actor Tom Riley. The 31-year-old starred in the British TV medical drama "Monroe," and in 2011 performed on Broadway in the revival of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" alongside Billy Crudup and Raul Esparza.
Riley's da Vinci is sexy, mercurial and irrepressible. He savors life in his native Florence: "Chaos and culture are celebrated within these walls," he says lustily. "Florence only demands one thing of its people — to be truly awake!"
But da Vinci suffers from being too awake. He is too driven, too full of ideas, too haunted by doubts about his life's intended mission. He is no stranger to opium, which he uses, he explains, because "I think too much. I need to dull my thoughts or I will be eviscerated by them."
At times he overreaches, stumbles and falls (though ever so dashingly). And he has an eye for a pretty face, including — at high risk — comely Lucrezia Donati (Laura Haddock), the mistress of Lorenzo di Medici (Elliot Cowan), da Vinci's benefactor and one of the city's most powerful figures.
He has an answer for everything, including an accuser who brands him "arrogant." "Arrogance implies that I exaggerate my own worth," da Vinci fires back. "I don't."
