How the Bold and Bloody True Story Behind The Uprising Reverberates Through History

The wind reaches the fens of eastern England before the light does, moving over the marshes in long gray sweeps. Andrew Garfield, muddied and short of breath, labors through it: a farmer with his ox, cutting furrows into the land. His character, Ploughman, is a man who refers to himself simply by what he does. Grief has pared him down to labor and memory. The plague took his wife and children, and all that remains is a hut, the animal that shares it through the winter for warmth, and the daily toll of survival. It’s slow and thankless work, the kind a kingdom takes for granted as readily as the earth beneath its feet.That lone farmer anchors Paul Greengrass’ new film The Uprising, in theaters Sept. 11. Written and directed by Greengrass, the filmmaker’s deepest reach into the past yet dramatizes the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when tens of thousands of English commoners, taxed past endurance in the long shadow of the Black Death, marched on London to demand a fairer world. Around Garfield, Greengrass assembled a cast that includes Jamie Bell as the rebel priest John Ball, Cosmo Jarvis as the revolt’s military leader Wat Tyler, Thomasin McKenzie as Alyce, a fictional follower of Ball,...