Catch up with the Queen and ‘The Crown’
Claire Foy portrays young Queen Elizabeth in Season 2 of Netflix series
INVERNESS, Scotland – At the entrance to the Ardverikie Estate, they’re awaiting the arrival of The Queen. A pipe-and-drum marching band in tartan kilts is on hand to “pipe her in,” but the 100 or so assembled extras in heavy coats and Mary Jane shoes — as well as the film crew and video village by the roadside — are the giveaways.
The queen that’s coming is Claire Foy, filming the second season of Netflix’s The Crown. Ardverikie doubles as Balmoral, Queen Elizabeth II’s holiday estate. Still, take away the cameras and the walkie-talkies and it could easily be 1957. As a vintage Bentley rounds the corner and starts up the drive, the crowds stare and cheer. They gawk in the window to see Foy, in a light blue suit, and Matt Smith, who plays her husband, Philip, Duke of Ed- inburgh, next to her. At the sound of cheering, Foy smiles reservedly and responds with her version of probably the most famous wave in history.
But it’s not quite the same wave we saw in Season 1.
“Yes, it’s evolved. It used to be more like this,” she says in an interview, offering up a limper, more unsure waft, “but now it’s like … this.” She gives an as-
sured, whole-forearm wave, very much the one you’ve seen the real queen give to crowds the world over for the last 50-plus years. Then she compares one wave with the other and laughs.
“It’s a ridiculous program, isn’t it? Because we’re pretending to be the royal family. Every moment is a slightly outof-body experience.”
The new season will see Foy’s Queen Elizabeth begin to resemble the monarch we know, with the hair and the handbags and the practical outfits that have morphed into a uniform.
“We take up where we left off at the end of Season 1, in 1956, and go through to 1964. In that time, I think she worked out her role and her duties. Like any job, she worked out how to do it. You realize if you set your hair a particular way, it’s not going to blow in the wind, and so that’s what you do. You wear the clothes that work; you do the wave a certain way, too.”
Creator and writer Peter Morgan says that though he wrote the second season as a continuation of the first, the show has changed.
“It feels a bit different,” he says. “She is now in her mid-30s, and I think that by your mid-30s you know who you are. So she feels like a more certain person. And they’ve also been married for 10 years by this point, and all marriages are in a very different place after 10 years. And Britain is in a different place — it’s another three or four steps away from the Edwardian Britain of her father and of the Empire. All those things combine to make it feel a little bit more assured but also darker.”
As Season 2 begins, Smith’s Philip is many miles away from his wife.
“He goes on this big world tour to Australia, Tonga, Papua New Guinea,” says Smith. “It’s basically an epic period road trip, and I have a stonking great beard. He and she are apart for five months. The marriage is slightly on the rocks. But then there’s so much going on at home.”
The time frame includes the Suez Crisis, JFK’s 1961 visit and the resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1963. There’s lots to cover.
“The scale was massive last year with the coronation and the wedding,” says Foy. “But the geography of this year is extraordinary,” as Somerset and Scotland stand in for locales from Salisbury to South Africa.
This year will also be Foy’s and Smith’s last in the roles: Olivia Colman already has been cast as the queen for the third and fourth seasons. Smith’s replacement hasn’t been named.
“I’m going to be sort of exhilarated and excited about doing something else, but also really, really sad,” says Foy, who won Golden Globe and the SAG awards for her performance. The series has been a jumping-off point for her movie career — she’ll play Lisbeth Salander in the next installment of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series.
“It’s strange, because often when we’re filming The Crown, we’re in the middle of nowhere,” she says, looking out over Loch Laggan in the Scottish Highlands, where there’s not a soul in sight. “But then you go to L.A. or New York, and you feel the impact the show is having, realize how much people have enjoyed it and want to talk about it. It will really be a wrench to let it go.”