Nero (film)

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Nero
Directed by	Paul Marcus
Starring	Hans Matheson Laura Morante John Simm Matthias Habich
Running time	197 min

Nero, the movie, is an Italian-British-Spanish TV movie, part of the Imperium series; it was made film available on DVD as of November 2005 in the U.S.A. and Canada. Produced by EOS Entertainment and Lux Vide for RAI and Telecinco.

1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Crew
4 External links

[edit] Plot

Although a great depiction of Nero's madness and relationship with his mother, the movie has many historical flaws. For instance, a manufactured love of Nero since his childhood years called Acte who he tries to marry in the film and is given as the reason for divorcing Claudia Octavia. In fact after Nero's divorce to Octavia he married his pregnant mistress Poppaea who had two husbands prior to marrying Nero. The film also shows Nero's mother being killed after Nero orders a trusted soldier to carry out the assassination, when in fact Nero made extensive plans to kill his mother, first by poisoning. Nero's second attempt at his mother's murder was having her mattress fixed so that when she lay down to sleep, a decoration on the ceiling above her bed would fall onto the bed. Agrippina, Nero's' mother, however always had one of her slave girls lay in her bed for a while to warm it up, so her slave girl was killed by the falling decoration rather than Agrippina. A third attempt was to have her take a voyage on a doomed ship, however Agrippina managed to swim to shore. The fourth attempt was to have a soldier kill her on the spot, which is shown in the movie as Agrippina comes towards the soldier and tells him, "Strike the womb that bore him".

The movie in many ways tries to show Nero as a good soul gone mad. Half the film concentrates on Nero's teenage years and his love life with the fictional Acte. In the film Nero is shown to have a fixation on playing the harp, which is only partly true. In a late part of the movie Nero is shown playing his harp in the center of a Roman Theatre as Emperor around 62 A.D. (which is fiction due to the fact that Nero never played his harp at any time in front of a large audience. He usually played his harp in isolation or within a small group of friends).

The film's budget was around 800,000€ and filmed on location in Sicily and Tunisia in late 2004 and early 2005.