We were joined on the Popternative show by Natascha McElhone who plays Bella Ainsworth in the PBS period drama series Hotel Portofino which returned for season 3 on July 28th. McElhone leads the series about a British family who run a hotel for upper-class travelers on the magical Italian Riviera during the glamourous “Roaring 20s” but also under the dark cloud of Fascist Italy.
Season 3 finds Bella (McElhone) preparing for the arrival of her father and sister when her husband Cecil (Mark Umbers) returns unannounced intending to divorce Bella and leave her to face the public scrutiny of being a divorced woman in 1929. Life then gets even more complicated for Bella and Cecil when the Wall Street Crash jeopardizes their financial future. Dark secrets are then exposed, old flames rekindled, and revenge plans are plotted during another adventure on Italian Riviera.
“There’s many things that have changed our world and continue to throughout the series and it’s fun to respond to those things,” Natascha tells us about the new season.
When discussing the historical portion of the series, she explains, “One of the things that I definitely was hypervigilant about, and so was Mark [Umbers] my costar, was context and historical context, and trying to get that as accurate as possible without getting bogged down in too much detail and [legalities], you don’t want to make it like a court of law and boring. But we did try and be forensic in looking at what laws were [then] and how we could navigate between them and what we needed to tell the story.”
Watch the full conversation with Natascha McElhone below.
Hotel Portofino is available on all PBS platforms including PBS MASTERPIECE on the Prime Video Channel, PBS.org, and the PBS App.
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