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Cursed is the latest of many attempts to bring the story of King Arthur to the screen, but the Netflix show takes a very different approach to the classic series of English myths and legends. Though Arthur (played by Devon Terrell) remains a key character, the main role in the Netflix show is that of Nimue, as portrayed by 13 Reasons Why star Katherine Langford.
Nimue may not be that well known a name to those not familiar with Arthurian legend, but many will know her by her other name, the Lady of the Lake.
The King Arthur legends are actually a whole host of different stories and poems, written in different centuries and in different countries. As such, there is almost no continuity between them—in some, Nimue is the Lady of the Lake, while in other she is a completely different character with links to Merlin or Lancelot.
She appears in different roles in different versions of the Arthur myth. In some, she is the foster mother of Lancelot, and in others, she becomes the wife the magician Merlin (and eventually traps him in a tree after learning all of his magic).
Nimue, however, is best known as the Lady of the Lake, who appears in some versions to give Arthur his famous sword Excalibur. However, she often gets left out of TV and film versions of the myth (like Disney's The Sword in the Stone) because they prefer to show the image of the one true King Arthur getting his powerful sword from a stone. In another version, the sword that Arthur pulls out of the stone is not Excalibur, but a different sword. As we said, no continuity.
The Cursed version of the character, however, is not purely defined by the help she can give a male hero. We meet Nimue as a young fairy or "fae" who is being hunted by the Red Paladins, a puritanical group who want to wipe magic off the face of the Earth.
Speaking to the New York Times, Cursed co-creator Tom Wheeler revealed his daughter was one of the inspirations for this new version of the Lady of the Lake. He said: "When we started talking about this story, my daughter was 10 or 11 years old and she didn't have characters to really lock onto in this mythology.
"Yet the themes—seizing the sword, taking control of your own destiny, responsibility at a young age—made this about building out a story for her that she could connect to. That idea of being the hero of your story is for all of us. It's great to have a woman with this sort of power."
The benefits of focusing Cursed on Nimue is that though she is a famous character, we actually know very little about her. Her powers are never explicitly revealed, though generally, they are water and nature-based. This meant that Cursed could work on a fairly blank slate.
As such, the Netflix version of Nimue has some new powers. As a member of the fae race known as the Sky Folk, she can call upon nature spirits. In a TV Insider interview, Wheeler described her abilities in the show as "an elemental power—a command over the trees and the fire and the wind that is shocking and often beyond her control."
Cursed in streaming now on Netflix.
