Madfabulous looks back at Henry Cyril Paget, the 5th Marquess of Anglesey, as a figure caught between inheritance and invention. Set in late Victorian North Wales, Celyn Jones’ period comedy-drama follows an aristocrat whose passions for theatre, jewels, costumes, parties, and performance make him a scandal to the people around him. Henry does not enter his ancestral world hoping to preserve it. He arrives like a disturbance in silk, feathers, and nerves.
Callum Scott Howells plays Henry as a man who treats existence as a stage, turning fashion and gesture into forms of resistance against class, gender, and family expectation. The society around him demands restraint, financial discipline, masculinity, and decorum. Henry answers with frocks, theatricals, and a hunger for spectacle that feels comic, wounded, and self-destructive.
The film’s appeal rests partly in that tension. Madfabulous wants to be a playful reclaiming of queer Victorian history, a tragic portrait of illness and loneliness, and a polished British period piece. Ruby Stokes’ Lily and Rupert Everett’s Gelert give Henry vital counterweights, helping the film find warmth inside its glittering disorder.
Henry, Lily, and Gelert
Henry is the film’s dramatic ignition point, and Howells gives him a bright, restless charge. His performance has the giddy confidence of someone desperate to be seen, mixed with the tremor of a young man who knows that attention can turn into punishment. Henry’s gender-nonconforming clothes, his staged dances, his jewels, and his private theatricals are presented as expressions of appetite and identity. They are also symptoms of excess. He can be generous, funny, vain, careless, tender, and maddening within the same scene.
That contradiction gives the character his spark. The film wisely avoids turning Henry’s sexuality into a case file. It frames him as someone living outside the approved scripts of Victorian romance and gender without pretending every part of him can be neatly decoded. His marriage to Lily is especially revealing. Their relationship has little interest in conventional marital intimacy. It works better as a pact between two misfits trapped inside aristocratic machinery.
Ruby Stokes gives Lily a lively, conspiratorial intelligence. She is drawn to Henry’s refusal to behave, partly because his rebellion gives shape to her own. Still, the film hints at the cost of that arrangement, especially in her frustration and loneliness.
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Rupert Everett’s Gelert brings the film its most quietly persuasive emotional rhythm. He watches Henry with affection, concern, and dry patience. His restraint sharpens Henry’s extravagance, creating a relationship that feels lived-in rather than ornamental. In a story crowded with people gawping at Henry, Gelert becomes the rare figure who truly observes him.
Costume, Landscape, and Theatrical Excess
The film’s strongest language is visual. North Wales becomes a space of beauty and pressure: castles, coastlines, grand rooms, and damp social formality pressing against Henry’s need for transformation. The wide-screen photography gives the locations a stately quality, yet the scale can feel suffocating. Henry has inherited a world built to preserve lineage, and he tries to turn it into a theatre.
Costume design becomes the film’s sharpest storytelling tool. Flowing dresses, pink suits, velvet hats, jewels, theatrical robes, and the winged outfit for Henry’s butterfly dance are all extensions of character. They reveal a man who wants to become image, movement, and myth before illness and debt catch up with him. His clothes are declarations. They are also armor.
The theatrical scenes and parties work in a similar way. Henry’s performances allow him to reshape the rules around him, at least for a night. He can turn the estate into a fantasy of his own making, inviting guests and servants into a social space where class and gender lines loosen. Yet those same spectacles drain his fortune and expose the fragility of his fantasy.
The early comic energy has real charm. Henry’s arrival unsettles rigid relatives and neighbors, and the film enjoys the comic shock of aristocratic repression meeting flamboyant self-display. At its best, Madfabulous resembles a Welsh cousin to the costume satire, filtered through queer history rather than courtly cruelty.
Charm, Thinness, and Tonal Friction
Madfabulous works best through wit, performance, and outsider companionship. Henry and Lily’s bond gives the film mischief. Gelert’s loyalty gives it emotional steadiness. The visual pleasure of Henry’s theatricals gives it a reason to sparkle. The premise carries fascinating dramatic potential: a queer-coded aristocrat tries to turn life into art while burning through a fortune, facing illness, family rejection, and public suspicion.
The screenplay struggles to turn that potential into sustained dramatic force. Henry’s estranged father, his declining health, and his hunger for affection should cut deeply, yet these threads often feel sketched rather than fully shaped. The consumption element arrives with familiar signs, especially the early blood-coughing, which announces tragedy before the film has earned its sorrow.
The film also has trouble balancing its registers. It shifts from camp comedy to tender self-acceptance drama, then to financial ruin, family conflict, and farewell pathos. Each mode has value on its own, yet the movement between them can feel uneven. Some supporting figures are drawn too broadly, appearing mainly to recoil at Henry’s behavior. That choice helps the comedy, then weakens the social world around him.
A cross-cultural reading makes the film richer and stranger. Henry’s life recalls global traditions of performance as self-fashioning, from European dandyism to theatrical forms where costume transforms gendered identity. Yet the film remains tied to a particularly British anxiety about class, property, and public embarrassment. Its rebellion is sincere, though its filmmaking can be too polite for such an excessive subject.
Madfabulous is handsome, enjoyable, and carried by strong performances, especially from Howells and Everett. It offers an inviting introduction to a fascinating historical figure, filled with memorable design and flashes of emotional insight. Its limitation lies in its caution. Henry Paget’s life was strange, excessive, comic, painful, and culturally slippery. The film captures the glitter, then hesitates before the deeper mess.
Madfabulous is a colorful British biographical period drama that celebrated its world premiere at the BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival on March 25, 2026, ahead of its wide theatrical release across the United Kingdom on June 5, 2026. The narrative charts the extravagant, rebellious life of Henry Paget, the flamboyant 5th Marquess of Anglesey, an eccentric 19th-century aristocrat who completely defied rigid Victorian societal norms regarding class, wealth, and gender through his lavish lifestyle, theatrical cross-dressing, and notorious “butterfly dancing.” Moviegoers can watch this camp historical romp on the big screen at local independent cinemas across the UK, with streaming and video-on-demand details expected later this autumn from Icon Film Distribution.
Full Credits
Title: Madfabulous
Distributor: Icon Film Distribution
Release date: March 25, 2026 (BFI Flare), June 5, 2026 (United Kingdom theatrical release)
Rating: 12A
Running time: 108 minutes
Director: Celyn Jones
Writers: Lisa Baker
Producers and Executive Producers: Nadia Jaynes, Sean Marley, Alex Ashworth, Paul Baker, Celyn Jones, Matt Pearcey, Nicola Pearcey, Kiah Simpson
Cast: Callum Scott Howells, Ruby Stokes, Rupert Everett, Paul Rhys, Siobhán McSweeney, Louis Hynes, Louise Brealey, Tom Rhys Harries
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Laurie Rose
Editors: Kevin Jones
Composer: Dan Baboulene
The Review
Madfabulous
Madfabulous is a handsome, spirited period drama with a fascinating subject and a lively lead turn from Callum Scott Howells. Its costumes, Welsh locations, and theatrical flourishes give Henry Paget’s story real visual pleasure, while Rupert Everett brings welcome emotional steadiness. The film’s weakness is caution: it gestures toward illness, loneliness, queerness, class, and financial ruin without fully shaping them into a sharper dramatic whole.
PROS
- Callum Scott Howells gives Henry vivid comic and emotional energy.
- Rupert Everett adds warmth, restraint, and quiet wit.
- Costumes and production design are striking.
- North Wales locations give the film texture and scale.
- Henry and Lily’s alliance has playful outsider charm.
CONS
- The screenplay can feel thin around Henry’s deeper pain.
- Tonal shifts between comedy and tragedy do not always land.
- Some supporting characters are too broad.
- The illness plot feels familiar.
- The film is too polite for such an excessive life.
