The Crown’s young queen thrust into early reign
The Netflix original series focuses on the conflicts between woman and queen, private and public, while following rise of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II
LONDON— The Queen, dressed in black, protected from the drizzling rain by a large umbrella, looked up at the statue on its plinth before her; it was draped in the British flag.
Around her stood flocks of dark-suited dignitaries; below, in the wide avenue called the Mall, a massed crowd waited silently. She began a short speech in her distinctively high-pitched, clear voice, then tugged the string that would pull down the flag to reveal the statue. It began to slide, then stuck halfway. A team of helpers rushed in.
Claire Foy, playing the young Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s new series The Crown, laughed. “I bet that never happens!” she said.
It was a grey, damp day last December, perfectly suited to the otherwise solemn scene being filmed, in which Elizabeth was about to unveil a statue of her father, King George VI. His death three years earlier, at 56, had suddenly transformed her from a shy young wife and mother into a queen. And at this moment, it becomes clear that Elizabeth — unlike her tearful mother and sister nearby — is able to conquer her swirling emotions and fully inhabit her public persona.
That conflict between private and public, between woman and queen, is the central subject of The Crown, an ambitious, sumptuous television production about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II that will have its Season 1 debut Friday in all of Netflix’s 190 territories.
As the success of Downton Abbey displayed, there’s a global fascination with the British royal family and aristocracy. But where Downton Abbey was fiction, The Crownis based on fact, with a far weightier dose of history and politics, including nuanced issues of constitutional duty and complex political infighting.
And that raises the stakes for both its creative team — headed by writer Peter Morgan and director Stephen Daldry — who must balance seriousness of intent against popular appeal, and for Netflix, which is hoping to attract a big enough global audience to justify one of its most expensive forays yet into original programming.
Morgan, the creator of the show, has extensive experience writing about Queen Elizabeth II. His 2006 film The Queen won several Academy Award nominations and the Best Actress award went to Helen Mirren as the monarch, facing public reaction to the death of Princess Diana.
Then in 2013 came his successful play The Audience, also starring Mirren and directed by Daldry, which swoops through some 60 years of the weekly meetings between Queen Elizabeth II and her prime ministers. The experience of writing The Audience gave him the idea for The Crown.
“I was really struck by the relationship between Winston Churchill, this old, frightened, fading lion, and this beautiful young girl who had become queen much earlier than she hoped,” Morgan said in an interview on set last year. “I thought, ‘This could be a film,’ and I started writing it with that intention. Then I began to think, ‘Shouldn’t the story start earlier, with her wedding to Philip?’ and then realized: There might be a TV show in this.”
Daldry became involved in the project early on, together with the producer Andy Harries. Their pitch: six10-episode seasons that would each span roughly a decade of the queen’s reign, covering both the personal events within the royal family circle and the political events of the time.
“We wanted to do the first two seasons straight up, no pilot,” said Daldry, whose other credits include The Reader, The Hours and Billy Elliot. “It was demanding from us, but we felt confident and excited about the material and we wanted a serious commitment.”
Netflix provided that commitment — filming for Season 2 is underway — and provided a budget that has been widely reported as over $100 million (U.S.) for Season 1. Cindy Holland, the vice-president for original content at Netflix, would not confirm the figure, but said the budget “was not outside the realm of other things we are doing or were considering at the time.”
(Netflix’s website describes the show as one of its “biggest budget shows ever;” its series from Baz Luhrmann, The Get Down, is reportedly more expensive.)
The first season covers the years between the 21year-old Elizabeth’s marriage to Philip Mountbatten (Matt Smith), in 1947, and her later decision not to allow her sister, Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), to marry a divorced man, in 1956. Each hour-long episode revolves around a central storyline, even as longer-running themes — the tensions in Elizabeth and Philip’s relationship after she becomes queen; Margaret’s ill-fated affair with Group Capt. Peter Townsend; Churchill’s tenacious hold on power — are threaded throughout.
As Morgan mapped out the season, he took into account changing viewing habits, understanding that the audience could binge all10 episodes at once rather than wait a week for its appointed time. “The main thing to avoid is a rhythm of repeating the same thing,” he said. “You want to change who your protagonists are, what your focus is. I don’t want anything to be predictable.”
He also tried to avoid rehashing stereotypes about particular decades.
“I’m always trying to tell stories that people don’t know,” he said, citing the toxic fog that blanketed London for five days in December1952, killing at least 4,000 people, and that is at the heart of Episode 4. “I wanted to avoid the whole journalistic ‘that was the year that was’ idea.”
Everything, he stressed, was based on fact. “I really don’t make much up,” he said in horrified tones, after being asked whether the Queen, who was educated at home, had really hired a tutor to help improve her general knowledge after her accession. “That stuff is all absolutely true.”
Morgan added that the series employed seven full-time story editors to check everything he wrote.
“Of course I have to imagine the private conversations and those are necessarily fiction, but I try to make everything truthful even if you can’t know whether it’s accurate,” he said.
When it came to imagining the relationships between members of the royal family, Morgan said that he wanted to emphasize “that these are complex adults with rich inner lives in the way that we all are.”
“I don’t want it to be prurient, but I also don’t want it to be too respectful,” he added. “The tone is all-important.”
Morgan and Daldry, who directed three of Season 1’s episodes and oversaw all of them, don’t shy away from imagining the difficulties of the young, virile Prince Philip when his wife becomes queen and he must defer to her decisions. (In a nota- bly dramatic moment in Episode 9, they are seen without sound, through the windows of a car, arguing violently.)
Nor do Morgan and Daldry avoid portraying the tensions between the vivacious Princess Margaret and her serious older sister, which come to a head at the end of Season 1.
“They are all struggling to come to terms with the conditions and context they find themselves in,” Kirby said. “She and Peter Townsend were the big public story of that generation; it was so much in the collective consciousness. But she was trapped by what she was born into.
“After what had happened with her uncle’s abdication for Wallis Simpson, she knew that she would have to face ostracism if she married him. She understood the stakes. Who you are in all this, public or private person, is the dilemma, and for Elizabeth, too.”
The reverberations of the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII (known as David to his family) in order to marry the divorced Simpson — which sees the throne pass unexpectedly to Elizabeth’s father, George VI, making her the heir — underpins all of Season 1, with frequent flashbacks to those events and to the young princess as a child.
“She wasn’t supposed to be queen and the family suddenly had that thrust upon them,” Foy said during a break in filming Season 2. “Particularly someone like her, who never wanted to be the centre of attention. And then her marriage with Philip had to change. I think they would have liked a conventional life where the man goes out to work and the woman stays home.”
In a telephone conversation, Smith said that researching the role of Prince Philip had made him aware of what “an interesting, dramatic and painful life” he had.
“He has a great wit, was a wonderful naval man, a wonderful family man,” Smith said. After his wife becomes queen, he added, “He is going to walk two steps behind her, wanting to feel the head of the family. It’s an interesting conflict to explore.”
Part of the pleasure of The Crown is its ability to offer voyeuristic glimpses of life at Buckingham Palace and other royal residences (The furniture! The objects! The clothes! The jewels! The footmen!) But it also offers a history lesson in world events, politics and the social manners and mores of postwar British society, seen through the prism of Elizabeth’s reign.
Asked how he had balanced these historical issues against a portrayal of the royals’ family life, Morgan said the choices were often “as random or as instinctive as guessing what will or won’t make something taste good when you are cooking.”
He added, “In an odd way, the show determines what you need,” explaining that if there had been several episodes dealing with constitutional issues, he might counterbalance that by focusing on a more emotional subject, such as Margaret’s relationship with Townsend.
“The royal family were renegotiating their relationship with the world,” said Philip Martin, who directed four episodes in Season 1. “Peter has a real understanding of how they somehow need the media and somehow want to escape. How the royals survive, how they negotiate their relationship with the public, is in some ways the story.”
“I don’t want it to be prurient, but I also don’t want it to be too respectful.” PETER MORGAN THE CROWN CREATOR