Netflix Sells Habsburg Pomp While Its Workers Sew for Weeks

Eighty-eight outfits for one actress. That's the number Netflix has chosen to lead with as it prepares to launch the third and final season of The Empress, its German-language costume drama about Elisabeth and Franz Joseph I, the Habsburg emperor of Austria-Hungary. The majority of those outfits were hand-sewn, each built from multiple layers of blouses, skirts, underskirts and corsets. Some took weeks to complete for a single scene.

The actress, Devrim Lingnau, put it plainly: "Some of the dresses we had were just seen once or something, in one small scene, and then they're gone again, and people were working on it for weeks." The people doing that work go unnamed in Netflix's production figures. The dresses get the numbers. The hands that made them get a passing mention.

The Inventory of Empire

The streaming giant has released a tally of what it takes to stage the lavish world of 19th-century European royalty. Twenty-three wigs for the main cast, four or five of them made specifically for Lingnau and her double. A further 120 beards and sideburns. Around 8,000 candles across the second and third seasons. And 440 fake Champagne bottles, many of them emptied into scenes of parties at Schönbrunn Palace.

Lingnau noted that drinking was a recurring feature of those sequences: "Almost all of the scenes in Schönbrunn people are drinking." Netflix says the first two seasons hit its Top 10 in more than 85 countries, with the final season launching Thursday. It's a global export, packaged and priced.

Kneeling on Command

About 2,000 extras were needed to recreate the crowds around the imperial family at weddings, coronations and public appearances. Philip Froissant, who plays the emperor, recalled the strange experience of walking into a room and watching hundreds of people immediately fall to their knees as part of the ceremony.

There's a grim joke buried in that image, and the production itself seems to have noticed it. Repeating scenes over and over tested the background actors, Lingnau said, until even the extras started laughing. "Even the extras are starting to giggle, because they don't take you serious anymore," she said. Two thousand people paid to kneel, and some of them couldn't keep a straight face.

Who Gets the Throne, Who Gets the Footnote

The show is based on the real lives of Empress Elisabeth, who was assassinated by an anarchist, and one of the last Habsburg emperors. Elisabeth, the article notes, struggled with her own mental health and shyness while fighting for her political beliefs and a place of her own in the world. That story has had plenty of afterlives: Romy Schneider in the 1950s "Sissi" trilogy, and Vicky Krieps in Corsage, four years ago.

So the dynasty is rebranded again, this time as a streaming product with a Top 10 ranking attached. The Habsburgs ruled a multinational empire. Their descendants in content form now reach audiences in more than 85 countries, with a showrunner, Katharina Eyssen, explaining the logistics. Eyssen said the team moved to studio sets after the first season because restrictions on filming inside actual castles had kept candles out of the historic locations. Even the preservation of old palaces shapes what the cameras are allowed to do.

The emperor's actor, meanwhile, got a far lighter wardrobe: around three types of military uniform and eight to 10 civil outfits. His sideburns are his own. Off set, he admitted, they make him look like "a trucker or a rocker, rockabilly guy."

The final season lands Thursday. The candles, the corsets and the kneeling crowds are all accounted for. The seamstresses are not.