The Last Kingdom season 5 has been out for a few months now, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. We may still have the follow-up film Seven Kings Must Die on the way, but the televised part of Uhtred’s journey wrapped up in spectacular fashion.
Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon) mostly got a happy ending. One character who had a darker arc in the final season was King Edward (Timothy Innes), the son of King Alfred the Great who is torn between protecting his own kingdom and seeing his father’s ambition for a united England fulfilled. Ever since Edward grew to adulthood and became a major player in events, he’s been a flawed, complicated character. Season 5 took that to a new level.
The low point came near the end of season 5, when King Edward revealed he planned to abandon the people of Northumbria, letting them fall under the rule of the Scottish King Constantine (Rod Hallett). This meant giving up Uhtred’s ancestral home of Bebbanburg as well as allowing Constantine to marry Edward’s own niece Aelfwynn (Phia Saban), who was kidnapped by Edward’s scheming former advisor Aethelhelm (Adrian Schiller).
It was a pretty dark turn for Edward, and it went over just about as well as you’d expect. Uhtred opposed Edward’s plan, and just about every other major character backed him, even Edward’s mother Aelswith (Eliza Butterworth) and son Aethelstan (Harry Gilby).
King Edward turning against Uhtred and his allies was “really horrible to play”
“The end of episode eight when I’m, like, going against Uhtred and the Avengers… It was really, really horrible to play,” Innes said on The Screen Chronicles podcast. “You just have all the characters turning against you, and you’re just the single guy. I read that scene and the first time I read it I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this. I can’t, I don’t agree with this.’ I read it and put the script down in my room and was like, ‘That’s not what I’ve been playing.’ My whole objective has been to unite the kingdoms as Alfred wanted. And this is just going against his whole thing. So it took me… I had to really sit down with it, and think about it.”
"Martha Hillier, who wrote the season, she wrote [the scene] for a reason. And she’s a genius. So I sat down with it and empathized with the situation, and got over my own ego. I went to the character’s ego and found that part, which was good. Because it took, like, three and a half days to film."
Whatever Innes needed to do to make peace with Edward’s dark turn, it clearly worked. The scene where all of Edward’s allies turn on him to support Uhtred’s plan to retake Bebbanburg is a standout moment in a season filled with them.
The Last Kingdom season 5 is out now on Netflix. The follow-up movie Seven Kings Must Die has wrapped filming, but as of yet no release date has been announced.
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h/t The Express