Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
‘The Crown’, good as ever, may change your of Charles and Diana opinion
EARLY in the first season of Netflix's
Queen Elizabeth II's grandmother advises the newly anointed 25- year- old royal in a moment of uncertainty to remember that the monarchy answers not to the British public, but to God himself.
“Monarchy is God's sacred mission to grace and dignify the Earth,” Queen Mary says sternly. “To give ordinary people an ideal to strive toward.” Elizabeth, inscrutable even in her younger years, gives her a long look.
If it was wishful thinking in season 1, it's a joke by season 5. The new season finds the royal family in 1991, in the thick of one of the ugliest periods of its recent history – almost everyone is up to no good.
But in a major feat for creator-writer Peter Morgan and the third iteration of the show's cast – keeping the tradition of replacing actors every two seasons as the characters age – nevertheless remains as sumptuous and compulsively watchable as ever.
As the story creeps ever closer toward current events, however, storylines tread on recent enough ground (the tabloid spectacle of Charles and Diana's divorce) to potentially rankle some who lived through the original scandals.
As Netflix tells it, the royal family's hobbies in the 1990s included sailing, carriage driving, watching horse races, having affairs, grousing about one another (in private and on television) and asking for favours from a Britain with which they share an increasingly strained relationship.
Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton), now in her 60s, pesters one prime minister and then another about a £15 million repair job for her royal yacht.
Her husband, Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce), spends conspicuous amounts of time aboard private jets with the wife of one of Prince Charles's friends.
Charles (Dominic West) and Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) squabble on vacations and sulk in separate castles while Charles carries on his years-long extramarital relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams), and Diana shares the royal dirty laundry with anyone who will listen.
Virtually every marriage in the family that's still standing is miserable, and it is prime minister John Major – played with understated magnetism by Jonny Lee Miller – who gives the season its thesis early on when he meets the royal clan.
“The House of Windsor should be binding the nation together. Setting an example of idealised family life,” he remarks to his wife. “Instead, the senior royals seem dangerously deluded and out of touch. The junior royals, feckless, entitled and lost.”
And yet, as always with the strokes of genius lie in the selection of anecdotes.
One episode takes a fascinating detour into Philip's pivotal participation in a 1993 effort to confirm the identities of bodies suspected to be those of the murdered Russian Romanov family. (As a descendant of the Romanovs, Philip gave a DNA sample that proved the link.)
Diana's brief post-Charles relationship with a British-Pakistani cardiac surgeon earns its short, sweet arc.
And Princess Margaret ( Lesley Manville) anchors a masterful episode about love lost and changing social mores. She shares a tender reunion with Peter Townsend, the royal equerry
MABEL Cadena says “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” required “huge work”.
The “Asphalt Goddess” star brings Namora to life in the Marvel sequel to the 2018 flick, which was delayed due to the death of its star, Chadwick Boseman, in 2020 from cancer, “like a MasterClass” because of all the skills she needed to pick up, such as learning new languages and upping her physical fitness. she was engaged to decades before but was forbidden by Elizabeth from marrying because he was divorced.
Curiously, while the show seems to have to dig deep sometimes to find affection for its characters, it seems to have the easiest time with Charles.
Conveniently for the real-life king, who awaits coronation to officially ascend to the throne, the show's depiction of the dissolution of his marriage to Diana presents a challenge to the version of events that has calcified into the American collective memory.
Season 4 reinforced that version: Diana's struggles with depression and self- harming behaviours were portrayed as outgrowths of the royal family's chilly demeanour and tacit approval of her husband's infidelity.
But season 5 presents a reversal. Charles? Less evil than you think, it seems to say. Diana? Kind of a little twerp, now and again.
Debicki, an Australian actress arguably best known for playing untrustworthy
After being asked what surprised her about the process of making the movie alongside her co-stars, Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke and Angela Bassett, the 32-yearold actress told Collider: “Everything. Everything. It's a surprise because, well, the training, it's huge. It's not easy.
“No, it's like a master class for me because you need focus on every part of your character. We need training for swimming underwater, for acting underwater, for holding our breath.
“You need to learn Mayan, you
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is perfectly cast as Diana. Her pain at the betrayal of her husband and the subsequent failure of their marriage manifests itself as pettiness.
She does a tell-all “her side of the story” interview with BBC reporter Martin Bashir and informs the royal family only when it's taped and well on its way to airing.
Alone at home, she watches a debate on whether Britain still needs a monarchy and repeatedly calls in to vote “no”.
Sure, Diana visits a hospital here and there. But she also loudly complains throughout the 10 new episodes about the royal family's “unsympathetic” treatment of so many near and literal strangers that by the time she quips her famous “I'd like to be queen of people's hearts” line to Bashir, it feels almost duplicitous.
Which leaves Charles and his paramour Camilla at the beleaguered end need to learn English, you need to learn a lot of things because we have a lot of diversity in the movie. So it's huge work in a movie like this. It's like, ‘Oh my God,” I need more hours in my day.'”
Alex Livinalli, who was being interviewed with Cadena, found the process “pretty different” to what he imagined after he was cast as Attuma.
The 36-year-old actor said: “On my very first day, the first person that I met was Winston, and one of the first things that he said to me was, ‘You're of all this, seeking comfort in each other. Williams plays Camilla as a likably no-nonsense woman with a few meaty scenes that remind the viewer that by the late 1990s, her enduring love for Charles had cost her dearly.
As a result, even the famously filthy phone call between the two that caused a scandal when it was taped and released to the public feels surprisingly tender, a moment of idle romantic mischief between two middle-aged adults yearning for each other.
It doesn't hurt that the show finds Charles continually fighting an uphill battle to modernise the monarchy.
Or that it spends a good chunk of one episode on the Prince's Trust, Charles's charity for young people, as though emphasising that Charles, too, did charity work and cared about helping people.
even extends one of epilogue sequences to it:
plays over an outro montage of West as Charles laughing and clapping with a horde of diverse young people, a few of them break-dancing.
has always seemed to relish the opportunity to knock historical figures beloved by Americans down a peg or two.
John Lithgow's Winston Churchill in the first season was a press-savvy egotist; the Kennedys, in season 2, was boorish and rude. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin appear briefly in the third season after their Apollo 11 moon landing, their groundbreaking accomplishments conspicuously dulled by their boring personalities.
Diana, it seems, in the grand scheme of targeted iconoclasm, is next in line.
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5 is streaming on Netflix. going to read the script. You're going to think about what you're doing. You're going to think about what everything looks like by the description of it, but when you see it, it's a whole different thing'.
“So most of the things that we shot was green screen, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to look like this. This is going to look like that.'
“But seeing the movie for the first time, it was just like, ‘Wow, this is pretty different than what I had in mind',” he said.