STACK #193 Nov 2020

TV FEATURE

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The third season of The Crown finds an older and wiser Queen Elizabeth II navigating the modern era, and a line-up of new faces in the House ofWindsor. THE CROWN RECASTING

Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth II

has this boring everywoman quality. That’s who Olivia is. Even though the Queen is the grandest person in the country, she is the woman at the bus stop. If you stripped the fact that she was the Queen and put 50-year-old Elizabeth Windsor at a bus stop you wouldn’t think twice. For example, Kristin Scott Thomas looks like a Grand Duchess, wherever you put her. She’s too aristocratic to be the Queen, so aquiline. Our Queen came to a point in middle age when she became every woman. That’s what so remarkable about Olivia. She’s a four-quadrant connectability woman.” Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret

No stranger to portraying royalty, Olivia Colman won the Oscar for Best Actress in 2019 for her performance as Queen Anne in The Favourite. Inheriting the British throne from Claire Foy to play the older Elizabeth II in the third season of The Crown , Colman received the 2020 Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series – Drama. “It’s definitely more daunting to play someone that everyone

part directly with the late Princess. “She said, apparently, she was glad it was me. My main thing when you play someone who is real, you kind of want their blessing, because you have a responsibility. “I asked her: ‘Are you OK with me playing you?’ and she said: ‘You’re better than the other actress’ … that they were thinking of. They will not admit who it was. It was me and somebody else. That made me think maybe she is here, because that is a classic Margaret thing to say. She was really good at complimenting you and putting you down at the same time. “Then she said: ‘But you’re going to have to brush up and be more groomed and neater.’ Then she said: ‘Get the smoking right. I smoked in a very particular way. Remember that – this is a big note – the cigarette holder was as much a weapon for expression as it was for smoking.’” Josh O’Connor as Prince Charles Season three paints the Queen’s eldest son as a flawed and sympathetic character, says the 30-year-old actor whose prior TV

knows,” Colman told Deadline . “The beauty of Queen Anne is that no one can tell me she didn’t sound like that, but everyone can tell me what the Queen sounds like, and that’s slightly annoying… It’s much harder to play people that everyone has a vision of, a picture of, and has ideas about. I’ve never joined a show that’s already been up and running and successful. But I was such an enormous fan of the show that I didn’t really think about it.” Creator Peter Morgan had no doubt that Colman could do it: “I loved what she brought to it,” he told Indiewire . “Olivia

There are a great many changes… One just has to get on with it.

The Harry Potter star and Tim Burton regular takes on the role of the Queen’s younger sister (previously played by Vanessa Kirby), whose stormy marriage to Anthony Armstrong-Jones, the First Earl of Snowdon, ended in scandal. Bonham Carter took researching the role to another level – another plane of existence, in fact – telling the Cheltenham Literature Festival that she had visited a medium to discuss the

– Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown

48 NOVEMBER 2020

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