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From an early airplane to a prototype calculator, Leonardo Da Vinci is credited with dreaming up many modern technologies. But Blake Ritson, who plays the Italian Renaissance man's arch-enemy Girolamo Riario in Starz's hit historical fantasy series Da Vinci's Demons, wishes he had come up with something a little more mundane.
"I'm waiting for him to invent velcro," he laughs. "That's my personal plea because when you have to go from wet to dry, you spend a lot of time putting on our boots in the morning."
Having appeared in numerous British period dramas, including Upstairs, Downstairs and Emma, the London-based actor is clearly relishing Da Vinci's Demons' more playful attitude towards history, which has much in common with Game of Thrones. "There will always be a market for big, ambitious shows where you don't know what's going to happen next," says Ritson.
"There's a bit of Game of Thrones in there in having different worlds that co-exist then flashing between them. But Da Vinci's Demons is very much its own entity."