Netflix has the perfect fantasy series for ‘My Lady Jane’ fans missing Guildford
And while you’re at it, appeal to the Amazon Prime Video Gods to save My Lady Jane!
Prime Video’s ridiculous decision to cancel My Lady Jane after one superb season—that gave us a new fictional guy to gush over in Edward Bluemel’s Guildford Dudley—is causing fans physical pain. Luckily, Netflix has come to our rescue with A Discovery of Witches.
Edward Bluemel has been around for a while before he was Guildford on My Lady Jane (read our review). You would’ve spotted the English actor in Netflix’s Sex Education, where he played Sean Wiley, brother of Emma Mackey’s Maeve Wiley. He was also Hugo on BBC’s Killing Eve, season 2 onwards. And in the Dakota Johnson-starring period drama Persuasion, again on Netflix, Bluemel played Captain Harville, one of Captain Wentworth’s naval friends that Anne and her group meet up with when they travel to Lyme.
But one of his prominent roles was in Sky One’s British supernatural fantasy series A Discovery of Witches, headlined by Teresa Palmer and Matthew Goode, in which Bluemel played Marcus Whitmore. Now here’s something that is going to make you squeal—No, he is not a horse in this one. He’s a vampire! Oh, and this is rather exciting for all the girls already gaga over Bluemel’s Guildford, but Marcus Whitmore is the Grand Master of a centuries-old society of chivalrous knights!
What is A Discovery of Witches about?
A Discovery of Witches is set in world where witches, vampires, and demons exist as different classes of the supernatural society, which is governed by a set of laws. These laws, chief of which is that the species aren’t allowed to intermingle, are enforced by the Congregation, a governing body headquartered in Venice, Italy, and formed by members of all the species equally represented. It’s all going mostly okay, apart from all species facing an unprecedented decline, when a witch, Diana Bishop, discovers a manuscript that activates her latent magical powers and causes turmoil in the supernatural world.
With several creatures pulled to her in this exact moment, one of them is Matthew Clairmont, a vampire belonging to an old and powerful vampire family, who is also a biochemist researching the species’ decline. What starts as mere curiosity ends up being love that takes Diana and Matthew across time to discover secrets of their world, their own families, and how to save everyone.
A Discovery of Witches is a three-season series that began in 2018 and completed in 2022. Apart from Teresa Palmer and Matthew Goode, the series also stars Edward Bluemel, Aiysha Hart, Owen Teale, Malin Buska, Louis Brealey, Alex Kingston, Valarie, Pettiford, Lindsey Duncan, Adelle Leonce, and Steven Cree, among others. It is based on a book series by Deborah Harkness called the All Souls trilogy, which recently expanded by adding two more books.
Who is Marcus Whitmore, played by My Lady Jane’s Edward Bluemel, in A Discovery of Witches?
Marcus Whitmore is a vampire, sired by Matthew Goode’s Matthew Clairmont, and therefore his son. According to the books, Matthew meets Marcus, who is a field medic and surgeon’s assistant, during the American Revolutionary War in 1777, and helps Matthew treat a few soldiers in his regiment. But a few years later, Marcus falls ill.
In an origin story that is quite similar to Edward Cullen’s with Carlisle from Twilight, Marcus catches a fever that lasts for four days, until Matthew finds him and offers to “help” Marcus, who accepts his offer to be turned into a vampire.
In the present day, after Matthew and Diana get together, Marcus is like a son to Diana. When Matthew and Diana are about to time travel to Elizabethan England to track her father and the Book of Life, Matthew passes on the position of Grand Master of the Knights of Lazarus to Marcus. It is an old order of chivalrous knights formed in 1098 by crusaders in Jerusalem, of which Matthew’s father Philippe, and then Matthew, became the Grand Master.
Another Edward Cullen similarity? Marcus meets Phoebe Taylor (Adelle Leonce), a human employee at a museum he visits looking for an important artifact, and flirts with her. They eventually fall in love, and Phoebe then decides that she wants to become a vampire so she and Marcus can be together forever! In fact, the fourth book in the All Souls series, Time’s Convert, is about Marcus’s origin story running parallel to the days leading to Phoebe becoming a vampire.
So if you’re missing Lord Guildford Dudley’s charming, flirtatious, chivalrous ways, as well as watching Edward Bluemel in a fantasy series, you should definitely check out A Discovery of Witches, which has recently arrived on Netflix. Best part? It’s a full series, so you won’t have to be worried about being cut off in the middle by cancellations!
And while you’re at it, appeal to the Amazon Prime Video Gods to save My Lady Jane so we can have our beloved JaneFord back!
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