The Royal family is a deranged institution, but it works, says the writer of The Crown
Peter Morgan gives his candid views of the Royal family ahead of drama’s second series on Netflix
BETWEEN his Oscar-winning film and smash hit Netflix series, Peter Morgan has not done badly out of the Royal family.
His secret? Treating the whole institution as if it were “deranged”.
Morgan, writer of The Crown, said he approached the monarchy as a “completely insane system”, which stood him in good stead compared with more typical “fawning” biographers.
Railing against “straitjacketed, deferential, unadventurous” writers of Royal histories, he claimed he offered a different approach as an “outsider”.
Morgan, who also wrote The Queen, the highly-rated film, and The Audience, a hit play, both of which starred Dame Helen Mirren, said he had never expected to spend so much of his career focusing on the Royal family.
The second series of The Crown, starring Claire Foy, and Matt Smith as the Duke of Edinburgh, begins on Netflix on Dec 8 and spans the Queen’s reign from the Suez crisis to the downfall of Harold Macmillan, ushering in the Sixties.
“Maybe it’s because I am an outsider – both my parents were refugees,” he told the Sunday Times magazine of the series’ success. If you had told me I would be doing this, I would have told you it was mad, hallucinogenic conjecture. I wouldn’t have guessed there would be anything more to say about this countryside woman of limited intelligence who would have much preferred looking after her dogs and breeding horses to being the Queen. But now I’m here. Life is strange.”
Saying the monarchy survived the 20th century without “catastrophic errors” from the Queen, he added: “They’re survival organisms, like a mutating virus.
“Look at how many prime ministers are wheeled out in coffins, on stretchers, having made fools of themselves: Downing Street is full of sick people. And yet she survives.
“It is clearly a deranged institution and a completely insane system, but perhaps it’s the insanity that makes it work. Belief in God is so deranged that it makes absolutely no sense, but it holds people together somehow.”
While Netflix does not release its viewing figures, The Crown is broadcast in more than 190 countries.
Secured by the streaming service after it outbid the BBC to pay a reported £100m for the first two series, it has become a critical hit.
It won a Golden Globe for best television series with further awards for Foy and John Lithgow as Churchill, along with nominations for Morgan and Stephen Daldry, who is the series director.
Asked about his version of Royal history, and whether it would go on to become an accepted version of events in the minds of the viewing public, Morgan suggested he approached it differently to a typical biography.
“Authorised royal biographers are so straitjacketed, deferential, fawning and unadventurous that they can only be after a knighthood,” he said. “Or they’re completely scurrilous and insolent, like Andrew Morton or Paul Burrell. I think there’s room to creatively imagine, based on the information we have about her.”
Olivia Colman will replace Foy in series three and four of the show and is due to be seen from 2019. She said: “I’m so thrilled to be part of The Crown.i was utterly gripped watching it.”
‘I think there’s room to creatively imagine, based on the information we have about her’