Swiss-American actress Dominique Devenport will return as Sisi and Jannik Schümann as Franz for season three, which Story House Pictures will produce in association with Beta Film.
Sisi was a bull's eye for RTL, which streams the series on its RTL+ platform as well as broadcasts it on its flagship, the linear channel in Germany. Beta has sold the series to more than 100 countries worldwide, including Mediaset in Italy, TF1 in France and Globoplay in Brazil.
In the RTL series, Empress Elisabeth is portrayed as a tomboy who, as a princess in Bavaria, falls head over heels in love with the handsome and powerful Franz, Emperor of Austria. But once married, Sisi faces the challenges of the royal court and grows into a confident, modern and fiercely independent woman and empress.
Sisi is part of a new wave of interest in Empress Elizabeth, who first became a pop culture phenomenon with Ernst Marischka's trilogy of period films in the 1950s, starring a young Romy Schneider as Sisi. Netflix also had a hit with Die Kaiserin, another reimagining of the Sisi story, starring Devrim Lingnau as the titular monarch and Philip Froissant as Franz.
Vicky Krieps played a 40-year-old and very in-your-face Empress Sisi in Marie Kreutzer's BAFTA-nominated Corsage, and German author Frauke Finsterwalder puts her own spin on the Sisi myth in the new Sisi and I, starring Susanne Wolff in starring as Sisi and Sandra Hüller as her up-and-coming lady-in-waiting Irma Countess von Sztáray. Sisi and I premieres Sunday at the Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama section of the festival.
