Humanizing a British PM on ‘The Crown’
Anderson did her homework to portray the ‘Iron Lady’ Thatcher
Gillian Anderson acknowledges she may have overprepared for her latest role — as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the new season of “The Crown” — before her hands actually touched a script. But she’ll tell you the exhaustive research was invaluable for getting into the psyche of Britain’s steely first female prime minister, who came to be known as the “Iron Lady.”
“I researched as if I were doing the Margaret Thatcher biopic,” she said by phone. “And then, from getting the script, I found myself going: ‘Oh, right, I am in six (episodes), not 10. This isn’t about me.’ Obviously, I’m being silly. But the nature of ‘The Crown’ — it’s through the lens of the crown.”
“That’s where the research helped,” she continued. “Understanding, potentially, why she is making kedgeree for the Cabinet ministers up in the flat above. And how important that is to her as a woman, as anything else is important to her.”
Now available to stream on Netflix, the new season of “The Crown,” created by Anderson’s partner and longtime royal chronicler Peter Morgan (“The Queen”), delves into the sometimes tense relationship between Queen Elizabeth and Thatcher, who served from 1979 through 1990.
It also explores the early period in the union of Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales.
This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.
Q: Had you been searching for a way to be on “The Crown,” or had Peter been searching for a role that would make you consider it?
A: When I first heard about “The Crown,” I was in New York doing (“A Streetcar Named Desire”) and the girl who played my sister, Stella, was Vanessa Kirby, who played Margaret (in seasons one and two). And she was talking to me about this thing that she had shot between when we did the play in London and when we did it in New
York. I had no idea, anything about it. And the thought of it didn’t really appeal to me. I didn’t think: “Oh, let me look into that, it sounds like something I want to do.”
Not that long after was when Peter and I got together, so I was exposed to it on a very intimate level and watching how it was produced and going to visit set and seeing how the feel of the set was very different than I had experienced on the majority of things that I’ve ever worked on — it really felt very adult, very well run. Not that other things I’ve done haven’t been, but it just felt there were a lot of grown-up people in charge and it had a really loving feel to it. But I never investigated, I never searched out ... and so when it came up as an idea, and Pete asked if I thought that I could potentially do Thatcher, and I thought about it seriously, there were two sides for that.
One was, would I want to work on “The Crown,” period? By that point, it was a no-brainer, having seen how beautifully the series was shot and written. And then the other was, did I think she could live somewhere inside me; did I get how to interpret her?
Both of those were resounding yeses.
Q: You were born in the U.S. but grew up in the U.K. What do you remember about the Thatcher era?
A: I grew up in the U.K., but we left in ’79. So we left the year she was coming in. I have no memory whatsoever of being aware of much political anything. I don’t remember dinner conversations about it, I don’t remember anything.
Q: She was such a polarizing political figure. Howwas it trying to find a compassionate journey in this role?
A: Ultimately, the Thatcher that
I’m playing is the Thatcher as per
Peter Morgan scripts in “The Crown.” There’s a lot of humanity in his scripts, period. No matter who the character is. And that’s no different for Thatcher. And so you get to see more than we’re used to seeing of her as a wife, as a mother. You see as much of those aspects of her as you do of her as a politician.
Between playing those scenes and understanding from the research that I did, just the challenges that she had specific to class, specific to the fact that she was a woman, and by the nature of the role that she was stepping into ... completely surrounded by men.
And she perpetuated that because she enjoyed the company of men, and there was only one woman that she hired in the Cabinet in the 10, 11 years that she was in office. She perpetuated that. But at the same time, as you see in the series, it was a different kind of support that she surrounded herself with when she recast the Cabinet and continued to reshuffle as she went on.
I think that you get a good sense of all aspects of her in the series, seeing a much more three-dimensional characterization of Thatcher than one might in a political documentary or one might have thought about her historically. I think that, if it’s not compassion — because there’s a lot of people who, regardless, will never find compassion
for her — at least there’s a sense of a human being there that was more than just the rhetoric and the policy.
Q: I assume you studied a lot of videos. Did you pick up on any of her tics or mannerisms beyond her voice that helped you sink into the role?
A: You can’t really see her in image and moving form without noticing the tilt of her head or the slightly buck teeth or how she holds her hand and the fact that she has a condition where her two outside fingers curl inward a little bit. You can see that when she’s gesticulating — those kind of things that you can pick up from video. And then there’s her walk, which is only her walk. She’s barreling ahead of every other world leader or whatever it is. So picking up on some of it but at the same time trying to not to make too much of it so that it’s not a mime.
Q: What was the process of putting a voice like hers together, to capture the nuance of her vocal pattern? Thatcher worked with a vocal coach.
A: She was born in the north, she was born in Lincolnshire, so she would have had a much different voice when she was a child. She received elocution lessons when she was in school. And so she’d already made steps in that direction. And then when her PR person came in, who kind of took her under his wing, he suggested she start to work on her voice.
You don’t get to really see, in this decade of “The Crown,” her at the podium or a party conference where you get the full weight of her oration and what happens to her voice in those situations. Just for the sake of the continuity of the show over the decade, it was important to find a voice that was a little bit grounded in my own sense so that it didn’t sound too forced. Before I started working with a voice coach, I had her in my ears and speakers and stuff, just to try and get a sense of her rhythms and the breaths that she took. It’s a very breathy voice and so, therefore, I have to start quite far down in the diaphragm.