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The Queen behind closed doors
It’s the year’s most talked-about show – a lavish drama about the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. Here the cast and crew of The Crown tell the extraordinary stories they uncovered. By Nicole Lampert and Gabrielle Donnelly
Prince Philip risked his life shielding Elizabeth from an elephant in Kenya. The Queen hesitated and stammered while making her wedding vows. Philip really did push for the Coronation to be televised despite courtiers’ complaints that it would be ‘vulgar’ – and King George had a lung removed in a makeshift operating room at Buckingham Palace. These are just a few of the astonishing scenes you’ll see in The Crown, the sumptuous new ten-part series telling the inside story of the first decade of the Queen’s reign. It’s full of wonderfully dramatic moments that viewers might suspect have been invented, but they actually happened.
It’s no wonder then that The Crown, created by the streaming service Netflix and costing £100 million to make, is the most talked-about show of the year, and could well change the way we watch TV. At least that’s what Netflix are hoping. Previously best known for House Of Cards with Kevin Spacey, they’re taking a huge gamble with The Crown ( just as Amazon Prime have done with The Grand Tour, their £160 million reboot of Top Gear) hoping the massive outlay will be matched by a significant number of new subscribers. The whole series will be available to watch immediately if you have Netflix (over the page we show you how to get it) although there will be a box set too in due course. reated by the British team behind the Oscar-winning 2006 film The Queen starring Helen Mirren, which focused on the monarchy’s troubles following the death of Princess Diana, the show has been put together through painstaking research into the period and will certainly give us a fresh perspective on the Royal Family. ‘ With The Queen we showed how fascinating things are when you scratch the surface,’ says executive producer Andy Harries. ‘The remarkable thing about the Royal Family is you could barely invent the extraordinary crises they’ve generated over the years, the situations they’ve found themselves in. It’s such a rich subject we knew we had to do it well, with big ambition.’
Big amb i t io n i ndeed, as The Crown intends to tell the story of the Queen’s reign – so far it’s been 64 years – over a possible seven series. The first starts at the beginning when Princess Elizabeth falls in love with dashing naval officer Prince Philip and marries him in 1947. She’s enjoying motherhood with the young Prince Charles and Princess Anne when her life is turned upside down by the premature
death of her father King George VI in 1952, leaving Elizabeth as Queen. Claire Foy, who played a very different queen, Anne Boleyn, in the BBC’s Wolf Hall, takes on the role of Elizabeth and says the show will shed fresh light on people we feel
we know well, yet don’t really know at all. ‘I think if you’re British you just accept that the royals are there and take them for granted on a day-to-day basis – the speech on Christmas Day, going to church at Easter, those sorts of things. I’d never really thought about her younger years, how much grief she must have felt for her father and how overwhelming that must have been when she came to the throne.
‘You suspect the royals just get on with it, that they’ve been trained, but she was unprepared and vulnerable and really sad about her father. She and Philip had thought she wouldn’t have to take the throne for another 20 years, but their lives changed in an instant. I don’t know how anyone could not sympathise with her.’
The Crown isn’t just about an extraordinary family, however. It also depicts the world around them and their impact on it, from the Great Smog of 1952, which ki l led thousands in London, to the 1956 Suez Crisis and Britain’s loss of empire. The idea for the show was born when writer Peter Morgan was creating his award-winning stage show The Audience, about the Queen’s weekly meeting with her prime ministers. ‘There was one scene between the young Queen and Winston Churchill where I suddenly thought, “What an interesting relationship – this young girl of 25 and a man who could be her grandfather.” We only really think of her these days as a woman over 60 but I realised it would be amazing to imagine her as a young woman in love, on the eve of her wedding.’ At f i rst Peter planned the project as a two-hour feature film but the more he looked into it, the more material he realised there was. ‘It kept on growing,’ he says. ‘We had all the stuff about how she was in Kenya on the day her
father died; when she woke up the following morning there was an eagle on her balcony. When she and Philip emerged from the royal residence, Sagana State Lodge, the waiting press photographers laid their cameras down, like soldiers putting down their weapons. They could have had a super photographic scoop but they put their cameras down out of sympathy. This all happened.
‘Then when she and Philip drove to the airport a group of Masai tribesmen suddenly appeared by the roadside to pay their respects; no one knows how the news could have travelled but it’s absolutely true they turned up. So we had all these stories, plus the impact that becoming Queen had on this 25year-old; on her life, her marriage, her relationship with her sister, with her mother. It was certainly too much material for just the one film.’
The first series, which is partly told in f lashback, is tinged throughout by one of the monarchy’s darkest episodes. The ripples are still being felt from King Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936 because of his love for American divorcee Wallis Simpson. At the time the Church of England – of which Edward was the nominal head – decreed that divorced people could not remarry if their former spouses were still alive. King George VI, Elizabeth’s nervous, stuttering father played by Jared Harris, is ill- equipped for a job he never expected to have.
We see him chain-smoking furiously every time he has to meet his public, a habit that caused the lung cancer from which he died at the age of 56. The Queen Mother, played by Victoria Hamilton, and the king’s mother Queen Mary, played by Eileen Atkins, who’s seen inhaling from an oxygen mask between puffs on a cigarette, never forgave Edward for, as they saw it, killing George.
‘He didn’t want to be king at all,’ says Jared Harris. ‘One of the fascinating things about power is that half the story is about politicians who are desperate to be the person sitting in the chair making the important decisions, and the other half is about people who really don’t want to be there at all. George never felt he was suited to the job.’
Stephen Daldry, the director and an executive producer who also made the Billy Elliot movie, says his biggest challenge was to ‘make the audience feel like they’re in the room’ with the Royal Family. We’re all used to seeing the royals up on the palace balcony but the show lets us see what it was like behind the scenes for the family fol- lowing Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip. As we hear the crowds singing God Save The King, George is nervously puffing on a cigarette in the room behind that famous balcony while the ladies are smoothing down
their dresses and carping about what some of the people are wearing. ‘It is about relationships and that is fundamental to everyone, whoever you are,’ says Stephen. ‘Working on this story of an extraordinary family with their extraordinary dilemmas has been one of the most thrilling jobs I’ve ever had.’
Even though The Crown makes no claim to be totally accurate, only that it is ‘inspired’ by real events, there were four full-time researchers and another four assistants poring over archives, history books and biographies looking for fascinating historical nuggets. But, of course, much of the drama happened behind closed doors. ‘Obviously the dialogue is imagined,’ says writer Peter Morgan. ‘Nobody was sitting there making notes. But the fact that two people were behind closed doors at that time is something we know for sure. Not all of it is exactly as it happened because sometimes you don’t know, but a lot of it is very, very accurate.’
There’s bound to be criticism from historians, not least when it’s implied that Elizabeth came close to asking Churchill to resign because of his lack of action in dealing with the Great Smog tragedy. And in one scene, which has been made up, Margaret bursts in on morticians as they’re embalming her late father’s body. Nevertheless, says Peter, ‘I take the responsibility very seriously of telling an accurate story here. A lot of people won’t read the history books about this period but they will watch this show which means they’ll make up their minds about the second half of the 20th century based on it. I am very aware of that.’
So what will the Queen and her family think of it? Major David Rankin-Hunt, an adviser on the series who worked for the Royal Family for 33 years, knows better than most. ‘I think they will be pleasantly surprised by the show,’ he says. ‘It’s not trying to be critical and there’s no hidden agenda; it shows the Queen and the Royal Family in a good light. Claire Foy does such a wonderful job as the Queen that I had to pinch myself that it wasn’t the real person. Her look, the way she talks and holds herself, she’s just like the Queen.’
While The Crown does show the family’s flaws – Elizabeth doesn’t like anyone stealing her limelight, Philip is petulant at having to bow to his wife – the cast say they could really empathise with the people they were playing. ‘You get to glimpse these people as real human beings,’ says Matt Smith. ‘You see them getting ready for bed and their domestic lives. I think we sympathised with them a lot and sort of grew to love them.’
All ten episodes of The Crown will be available to watch on Netflix from Friday 4 November.