Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 5 - Epilogue

  • Shushma Malik, Roehampton University, London
  • Book:
    The Nero-Antichrist
    Published online:
    27 March 2020
    Print publication:
    16 April 2020, pp 183-196

  • Summary

    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.