‘Suddenly people view me in a dif erent way’

She’s the queen of the small screen, but will Claire Foy reign in cinemas? Mick Brown finds out

In her roles as Queen Elizabeth II and Anne Boleyn, Claire Foy has demonstrated a quiet genius for conveying a multitude of emotions and thoughts without saying a word.

It is all there in the face: porcelain pale, with perfect features and those startled-wide eyes. The pauses, the almost imperceptible shifts in expression; the steely, basilisk gaze. It is hard to take your eyes off her.

It is something she shares with Mark Rylance – whom she acted opposite in Wolf Hall – and which is rooted in a particular ability that may not be immediately apparent to the average viewer.

‘The one thing they do better than any other actor that I know is listen,’ says the director of Wolf Hall, Peter Kosminsky. ‘In real life you don’t know what the person you’re talking to is going to say next, so we listen very carefully, not least because we have to work out what our next remark should be.

‘The problem for actors is that what is about to be said is known to them – they’ve spent much of the previous day learning it. But somehow they have to make it feel that what they’re about to say flows out of what’s been said to them, and that is about listening.’

Foy in person is much more animated than her facility for silences might suggest. A petite figure,

‘The monarchy are weirdly a reflection of us… They are at our whim, we can turn on them in a second’

dressed in a black jumpsuit and trainers, we meet for lunch at a hotel in Clerkenwell, where she arrives precisely on time. There has been a mix-up over booking a table, but we shan’t worry about that, so we sit in the bar, eating crisps, dips and Scotch eggs, which Foy devours – she’s not the least bit regal, and somewhat bemused by the whirl of attention occasioned by the extraordinary success of the Netflix series The Crown.

The second series of The Crown arrives on our screens in December. It is Foy’s swansong in the role. In the third series the Queen will be played by an older actor, yet to be announced. While the first series dealt with the Queen struggling to come to terms with her position, and the conflict between duty and family, the new series concentrates more on her marriage to Prince Philip.

‘They’ve had 10 years of a relationship,’ Foy says, ‘and it’s changed beyond belief from when they first met each other. Rather than just talking to each other, they ’re essentially fighting the entire time, which is awful.

‘But it’s also about her advancing into middle age. When she first came to the throne she could do no wrong in peoples’ eyes. Then, coming in to the ’60s, it’s more a case of, “Who are you? What are you for? Look at your hair! What on earth are you wearing?” And her going, “I feel a bit frumpy. I’m wearing the same clothes as my mother.” She is realising that she as a person is open to criticism and that the institution is, too. It’s “change or die”, but she’s in a quandary of “I don’t know how to change”. I think that’s the nature of the monarchy as a whole; they are weirdly a reflection of us. A lot of people may think they are incredibly privileged, but they’re at our whim. We can turn on them in a second and you’ve seen it happen time and again, when they’ve carried on and then realised they have to catch up. They reflect public attitudes and they have a responsibility.’

For Foy herself, playing the Queen has also been a process of change, modifying her attitudes to the monarchy. ‘That’s why I think the series is so good; instead of just looking at the institution, it’s looking at them as people, what experiences and challenges they ’ve had and what you can learn from how they’ve dealt with things. I don’t think you can take away from her the fact that she has never had a choice to do what she wants to do. She has completely lived for her country, and she’s still working now, at her age, and I really admire that.’

We are meeting to talk about Foy’s new film, Breathe, based on the true story of Robin Caven-

a degree of mobility that enabled him to live at home and even travel abroad. Supporting his family by playing the stock market, he became a tireless advocate for the disabled, helping to develop numerous devices to provide independence to the paralysed. He lived to the age of 64.

Pro duce d by Cavendi sh’s s on Jonathan, Breathe is the directorial debut of Andy Serkis, best known for his motion-capture acting roles as Gollum in Lord of the Rings and as the giant ape in King Kong, and with whom Foy appeared in 2008 in her first major role in Little Dorrit. It i s a remarkable and deeply touching film. Garfield gives an extraordinary performance (most of it lying on his back) as the indestructible Cavendish. While Foy – who is becoming something of a specialist in playing living characters – is superb as his wife Diana. The couple had been married for only a few months when Cavendish contracted polio; he urged his wife to switch off the machine and build a new life without him. Refusing to let her husband succumb to despair, she nursed, cared for and went on to campaign alongside him.

‘She was very young when they met,’ Foy says. ‘And so suddenly meeting the love of your life, and him saying, “I’m done for,” her reaction was, “Well, you’re not. I know it ’s terrible, but trust me. If you’re going to be alive, you’ve got to make the most of it.”

‘How incredible that he was able to come out of that depression and say, “This isn’t the life I wanted, but I’m going to go on living it.”’

Throughout his life, Cavendish was always just three minutes away from certain death – the amount of time he could have survived had his respirator failed due to a power cut, a blown fuse or – as happens in one particularly heart-stopping moment – a playful dog yanking out the plug.

‘That happened,’ Foy says. ‘But thankfully they had a bell that he was able to ring.’ In other emergencies, Cavendish was kept alive by Diana and Jonathan hand-pumping the respirator.

True, one thinks, to Cavendish’s indomitable spirit, Serkis injects a light-hearted vein into what could otherwise have been a sombre story. This includes the presence of Tom Hollander playing identical twins, and a knockabout scene where the family make a hair-raising journey to Spain in their converted Bedford van, to the accompaniment of Lee Marvin’s Wand’rin’ Star.

‘Andy said he wanted to make a cross between The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,’ Foy says with a laugh.

Diana is now in her 80s and ‘the most extraordinary woman’, says Foy, who spent time with her to prepare for the role. ‘She doesn’t see herself as a hero at all. I asked her, “What’s the worst thing I could possibly do?” And she said, “Over-sentimentalise it and make me some angel.” Jonathan said, “I saw my mother cry once, at Christmas, because she was given a kettle as a present.”’

Diana’s precisely modulated upper-middle class tones, and her practical, determined and no-nonsense manner inescapably calls Foy’s role as the monarch to mind.

‘There was a moment when I thought maybe I just can’t do this, because they are similar people in many ways. But there is no way I could have not done the film.

‘It’s the same kind of time period, and they’re a similar generation. They’re both very much: “Don’t complain, just get on with it, suck it up.”

‘ Yo u s a y t o Di a n a , “Di d y o u e v e r g e t depressed?” And it ’s, “Of course not! Why on earth would I get depressed?” You get up and get on with it and have a cup of tea.’ It’s the war generation. They must just look at us now and think, ‘“My God, you’re going to see a therapist?”’

The daughter of a salesman, Foy was born in Stockport and is the youngest of three – she has a brother and sister – but moved as a child to Longwick in Buckinghamshire. Her parents separated when Foy was two, leaving her mother to

bring up the children on her own. ‘I don’t know how she did it. She took a job that meant she could be there for us when we got back from school. She is an extraordinary mum and an extraordinary grandmother. There is not anything she hasn’t given us.’

Circumstances were difficult. ‘I was always very, very aware of money and not having any.’ At 14 she was working for pocket money at the local

‘You find a lot of youngest siblings are actors. They’re looking for someone to say “this is who you are”’