ROYAL ACADEMY
As she steps into Princess Anne’s sturdy shoes for the latest instalment of ‘The Crown’, Erin Doherty tells Sophie Elmhirst why playing the Queen’s daughter has taught her so much
he coffee shop where I meet Erin
– a stylish, large-windowed café in Greenwich, not far from where she lives – is one of the places the actress used to come and try out her Princess Anne. Preparing for the part of the Queen’s daughter in The Crown, Doherty would walk for miles listening to a recording of the Princess she’d copied from an old Parkinson interview. After hours of Anne streaming through her headphones, she would stop off at the café and order her espresso in, as she calls it, ‘the voice’ – a voice so extreme and so remote from her natural way of being and talking that she decided she had to make it her own.
In real life, Doherty talks in pure Crawley, which is where she grew up, near Gatwick Airport, and her instinct is to smile and joke through everything, to make life and conversation easy for everyone around her. She’s casual, clad in a jumper and jeans, hair in a low ponytail, a person happily without front or formality of any kind. For anyone who watched her in the third series of The Crown, the transformation is total. Doherty’s Anne has the kind of straight-backed seriousness of someone for whom smiling might be physically painful. She’s witty, but always with an edge; she has a coolness and a hardness that seem impenetrable. Doherty, inevitably, adores her: ‘I fell in love
with Anne.’
The affair began as Doherty prepared for her audition, all the way back in 2018. She had one short meeting, followed by a filmed reading in front of the casting directors and director, and then she got the part. The call came from her agent while she was sitting in a theatre bar with her girlfriend, also an actress, who said, ‘What’s happened?! Your face has gone purple.’ Doherty went for a walk to take it all in, knowing her life was about to change radically, and then they celebrated with a curry.
It’s one thing starring in the great cultural behemoth that is The Crown if you’re Olivia Colman or Helena Bonham Carter; quite another if you’re Doherty, who, prior to winning the part, had been in one episode of Call the Midwife
and a couple of plays since leaving Bristol Old Vic drama school. She wasn’t scared of the work so much as the cast. ‘I was like, “How the hell am I going to keep it together with Olivia Colman?!”’ Luckily, Colman helped her adjust (‘She’s just such a gorgeously normal person’), but then there was the scale of the Crown machine to get used to. ‘Nothing can prep you for it,’ she says now, laughing. ‘They’ve built Buckingham Palace in a studio – it’s absolute carnage!’ The show’s writer, Peter Morgan, arrived on set during the first episode: ‘He just appeared, and I was like, oh God, that’s Peter Morgan.’ She did her first scene with Prince Philip, played by Tobias Menzies (‘a sweetie’), and it went well. From that moment on, Doherty allowed herself to think, ‘OK, I have a right to be here.’
Early in life, it wasn’t obvious Doherty would end up acting at all: her stage could just as easily have been Stamford Bridge. Growing up, she played football obsessively, both at school and for her local club, the Crawley Wasps. ‘We were pretty great, in yellow and black,’ she recalls, fondly. ‘We’d win, like, 10-0 – we were that team. I bloody loved it.’ After her parents separated, they put her and her older sister in a Saturday drama group, to help them process what was happening to their family, she thinks. For years, that was her weekend – Saturday drama, Sunday football. She was deeply committed to both and was scouted for Chelsea. Then, when she was 13, her father said he couldn’t go on driving her around the country for football matches and to drama club, and she had to choose between the two. ‘I think it’s why I’m so devoted to it now,’ she says, ‘because I’m like, well, I made a choice, and I stand by it.’ (Though she still does keepy-uppies in the garden most days as a kind of meditation – anywhere between 40 and 100 – and sends videos of them to her father to prove she hasn’t lost the skill.)
‘Devoted’ doesn’t quite cover Doherty’s attitude to her job. I’ve never heard an actor talk about acting the way she does – with pure, obsessive commitment, a sportsperson’s single-minded discipline. ‘I do have very black and white ideas about things. I’m in or I’m not,’ she says. ‘It’s a love for it – if I could swim in it, I would, if I could bathe in it, I would.’ There’s also a sense of never taking the job for granted. When she left school, Doherty tried out for multiple drama schools, twice, and didn’t get in anywhere on either occasion. She had to pay for all the auditions herself, which set her back financially, but that didn’t put her off. She worked for a year back at her old school, Hazelwick, as a PE technician, ‘literally pumping up balls, washing football kits’, and got into a drama foundation course in Guildford. After a year there, she tried again, and secured a funded place at Bristol Old Vic drama school. It was a three-year course, and full on, she recalls, but partly because she made it so: ‘Any opportunity to spend 24 hours a day thinking about this thing that I thought was just