The Three Musketeers have appeared in countless books, films, TV series, comic books, video games and even a musical.
So for their latest adaptation in the new drama series “The Musketeers” — premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. on BBC America — creator Adrian Hodges wanted a more modernized portrayal of the classic Alexandre Dumas characters Athos, Aramis, Porthos and D’Artagnan.
“It’s not like the fairytale Musketeers that you’re normally used to. It’s got a certain level of grit to it and it’s not always happy endings,” star Luke Pasqualino tells The Post by phone from Prague, where he is filming Season Two. “You get to know a lot about these characters in 10 hours.”
In the series — which premiered last January in the UK, where it is already renewed for a second season — Pasqualino, 24, plays the young country fighter D’Artagnan, who travels to Paris to avenge his father’s death and falls in with the Musketeers.
The action drama follows them as they work to protect King Louis XIII while fending off the schemes of the shadowy Cardinal Richelieu (Peter Capaldi, the new Time Lord on “Doctor Who”). Santiago Cabrera (Aramis), Tom Burke (Athos) and Howard Charles (Porthos) co-star.
The quartet often find themselves in combat, for which the stars had to attend a “Musketeer boot camp” prior to filming Season One to learn how to wield a sword (and the trademark muskets). Even now, Pasqualino says the actors — who do their own stunts — spend anywhere from an hour to three weeks choreographing the show’s many fight sequences.
“It was one of those things I found quite difficult at the start, especially during boot camp — angles, where to hold your sword, how to defend,” he says. “But it’s like anything, the more practice you do the easier it becomes.”
Born in England to Italian parents, Pasqualino got his breakout role playing the lead in the UK series “Skins” at just 19. He went on to appear in Showtime’s “The Borgias,” another period drama set in the early 17th century (ironically, he says history was his worst subject in school).
“Already having experience on ‘The Borgias,’ it was nice to come into this knowing a little bit more about the era and the period,” Pasqualino says. “I’ll be ready for something contemporary next, I’m sure.”
In fact he will next be seen in the futuristic movie “Snowpiercer” — about a train that carries the last known survivors on Earth. The movie, starring Chris Evans, also filmed in Prague, before Pasqualino started on “The Musketeers.”
“It’s so funny, the apartment where I’m staying this year is directly opposite the apartment [where] I stayed in 2012 when I did that movie,” he says. “It’s quite surreal to be back.”