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The Legacy of Revival
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 March 2020
The Epilogue explores the Nero-Antichrist paradigm in TV and film. Directors and the actors they cast made their own, often personal, decisions about how to portray Nero. It would have been impossible for any one actor to relate every aspect of Nero’s character from literature: cruel, theatrical, violent, militarily inept, destructive, decadent, paranoid, volatile, sexually promiscuous with women and men, and supernatural in his role as the Antichrist. Like those creating Neronian paradigms, they picked, chose, and emphasised the bits they found useful. However, one thing that players of Nero such as Alberto Sordi, Christopher Biggins, and Michael Sheen all had in common was their debt to Peter Ustinov’s portrayal of the emperor in the 1951 Hollywood epic Quo Vadis. This film was based on Sienkiewicz’s 1895 novel, and this novel in turn drew heavily from Farrar’s Darkness and Dawn. As such, Nero’s position in Christian history continued to underpin the idea of the emperor in TV and film into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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