Trivia / The Crown (2016)

• Ability over Appearance:
  • Of any of the cast members, Jared Harris looks perhaps the least like the person he's playing, King George VI, who had completely different facial features and a far narrower face, darker hair and a slimmer physique. However, Harris' performance has been amongst the most praised.
  • John Lithgow pulls off a memorable performance as Winston Churchill in spite of his long face and towering height while playing the 5'6 and famously round-faced Churchill.
  • Played with regarding Elizabeth II: Claire Foy looked a lot like her in her youth with the same coloring but while the Monarch was a busty woman, Foy is more flat-chested and sometimes had to get padded up for her costumes.
  • Whilst Vanessa Kirby is facially fairly similar to HRH The Princess Margaret, she's a clear 7-8 inches taller than the Princess herself, who was just a shade over 5' (and very conscious of the fact).
    • Helena Bonham Carter's casting counts. While she is closer in stature to the real Margaret than Kirby, she does not really resemble either woman. This is especially noticeable in the second episode of season 3 where Bonham Carter is shown side by side with Margaret's child actress Beau Gadsdon.
  • Victoria Hamilton, even with the necessary padding for her naturally slim figure and costuming to make her appear like a dowdy Grande Dame, isn't as heavy or plain as the real Queen Mother.
  • Unlike Claire Foy, Olivia Colman’s eyes are not a match for Elizabeth’s famous striking blue ones. Attempts at using contacts and CGI alteration both failed, so they just went ahead with the show’s Elizabeth now having brown eyes and counting on the performance to help people overlook it.
    • Helena Bonham Carter also has brown eyes opposed to Margaret's (and Vanessa Kirby's) blue.
  • Anne in her youth had a curvaceous figure with a tiny waist, her portrayer Erin Doherty while being a dead-ringer for her, is model-slender.
  • Though he had a clear resemblance to the man, Josh O'Connor is far more conventionally handsome than Prince Charles was in his youth, to the point where the show barely acknowledges the much talked about disparity in looks between him and Princess Diana.
  • Dominic West's Charles also manages to avoid the Tall, Dark, and Handsome archetype that his very attractive actor would normally lend to the character, thanks to a performance filled with awkward mannerisms and an overall grimacing, somewhat tortured demeanor.
• Actor-Shared Background: Phillip's brother-in-law, the German Prince Georg Donatus, is played by actual German Prince August Wittgenstein (His full name is Prince August Fredrik of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg).
• All-Star Cast: The cast is full of solid and household multi-awarded actors, including:
  • Playing royals: Jared Harris, Claire Foy, Olivia Colman, Imelda Staunton. Matt Smith, Tobias Menzies, Jonathan Pryce. Vanessa Kirby, Helena Bonham Carter, Lesley Manville, Dominic West, Elizabeth Debicki, Charles Dance.
  • Playing politicians: John Lithgow, Anton Lesser, Michael C. Hall, Clancy Brown, Gillian Anderson, Jonny Lee Miller.
  • Others : Stephen Dillane, Timothy Dalton, Olivia Williams.
• Approval of God:
  • Elizabeth II's granddaughter Princess Eugenie is a fan of the series.
  • Michael Fagan very much liked Tom Brooke's portrayal of him, even if it wasn't especially accurate.
  • In his interview with James Corden, Prince Harry says he is alright with the show because he knows it's fictional but it gives a rough idea of what royal life is like. He prefers the show rather than the news stories about him, his family, and his wife. Then, he suggested Damian Lewis to play him. Whether his approval stems from the fact that he's become estranged from his family over his perception of them ill-treating his wife or, slightly more cynically, that he does not wish to bite the hand that feeds (following his and Meghan's content deal with Netflix), is up for debate.
• The Cast Show Off:
  • Vanessa Kirby does her own singing in the scene where Margaret sings with King George VI, as does Jared Harris.
  • Josh O'Connor rattles off several tongue twisters in long takes.
  • Helena Bonham Carter also gets to show off her singing. Of course, given prior comments from Bonham Carter, she'd be unlikely to call it showing off.
• The Danza: John Major is to be played by Jonny Lee Miller.
• Darkhorse Casting:
  • With the exception Matt Smith, most of the actors playing Royals in their youth were either unknowns. Josh O'Connor was on the rise at the time of his casting, though still not a particularly big name yet.
  • Bertie Carvel is mostly just famous amongst theatre audiences, so his casting as Tony Blair came as a surprise to many given the other two most famous prime ministers covered in the show's timeline were portrayed by A-list actors (John Lithgow as Winston Churchill and Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher).
• Disowned Adaptation:
  • Prince William has never publicly commented on the series but reportedly thought Series 4 was exploitative of his parents and presented them in a false way.
  • Diana's brother, Charles Spencer, is very critical of the show, reminding viewers that it's fiction and not a history lesson. He even rejected the producers' request to film at Althorp, his family's ancestral home.
  • Prince Philip was reportedly extremely insulted by the series' portrayal of his sister Cecile and her family's death. To the point where it's rumoured that this was the closest any member of the royal family came to seriously considering taking legal action against the show.
  • Series 4 in general has received the most negative response from those depicted, their families, royal historians, and reviewers, with Peter Morgan accused more than ever before of sensationalising and downright fabricating the truth. Understandable as the series moves ever closer to the present-day, with many of the events depicted (realistically or fancifully) occurring within comparatively recent, and often painful, memory.
  • Margaret Thatcher's children have voiced their disapproval of how their mother was portrayed.
  • John Major condemned his depiction in some scenes of Series 5 in a statement calling it a "barrel-load of nonsense" and "damaging and malicious fiction". He was particularly aggrieved by a scene in which Prince Charles tries to get Major's support for persuading the Queen to Abdicate the Throne ^note  in Real Life, the newspaper article and opinion poll they're discussing was actually much less incendiary than depicted, and was actually published before Major even became Prime Minister , and others where he and his wife Norma discuss the Royal Family in a disparaging manner. Tony Blair also didn't like the show's portrayal of him, calling it "complete and utter rubbish". It's worth noting that they are the first still-living British PMs to be depicted in The Crown at the time of airing, all of their predecessors having died before the show started.
  • Paparazzo Mario Brenna has labelled the story about Al-Fayed hiring him to photograph Dodi and Diana "absurd and completely invented"
• Dueling Works: With Victoria, as biographical series of the most seminal, long-ruling queens in British history. Both feature former Doctor Who co-stars Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman, respectively.^note As well as Alex Jennings as scheming royal uncles, the Duke of Windsor and King Leopold of the Belgians, respectively. Noteworthy is how much of a study in contrasts the two casts are. The Crown's producer even fanned the flames by saying Victoria is not in the same league as The Crown.^note The Crown is a mega-production, with the first season reportedly costing $13 million per episode to produce (a figure Peter Morgan says is exaggerated, other sources claim it was as low as $5 million per episode), while the per-episode budget for Victoria is reported as $1.5 million. For what it's worth, The Crown has made a global splash and has won numerous accolades, including more than 20 Emmys, while Victoria did not win a single major award. Victoria ended after its third season, having covered less than 15 years of Victoria's 63-year reign, while The Crown is set to wrap up with its sixth season, covering over 50 years of Elizabeth's reign.
• Enforced Method Acting: Olivia Colman had tremendous trouble toning down her extremely expressive face to match Elizabeth's Stiff Upper Lip demeanor, so the crew ended up giving her an earpiece where they'd play shipping forecasts that she'd have to work to pay attention to.
• Fake American:
  • Americans Wallis Warfield and John Foster Dulles are played by British actors.
  • Jackie Kennedy is played by the South African Jodi Balfour.
• Fake Brit:
  • The American actor John Lithgow plays Britain's most famous Prime Minister (although Churchill's mother was American).
  • In a variation of this trope, the rest of the British cast had to be coached on how to affect the English accent as it was in the 1950s. Claire Foy has joked that maybe the Queen herself also has to do the exercise she came up with of saying "One" over and over to keep the accent.
  • Margaret Thatcher is played by the American actress Gillian Anderson. That said, Anderson spent half her childhood in London and switches naturally between American and British accents; also it appears that she considers herself to be neither fully British nor fully American, but fully a Londoner.
• Fake Nationality: Prince Philip (who is Greek of Danish, Russian and German ancestry, although he was more or less raised in Britain from the age of seven and became a naturalised British subject shortly before marrying Elizabeth) is played by the British actors Matt Smith and Tobias Menzies.
• Follow the Leader: This series comes a year after the film A Royal Night Out, depicting a young then-Princess Elizabeth. It could even be viewed as a Spiritual Successor, given that A Royal Night Out follows Elizabeth when she was nineteen.
• Font Anachronism: A mild one—for the Arabic. Arabic-language signage in the Egypt scenes in Seasons 1 and 2 is invariably Naskh—and in a particularly straight-lined variant that, while it existed in the 1950s, was really only used in newspapers until the 1970s, and really isn't all that common as a display typeface except in its bold form (which the signage often isn't). Arabic signage at the time would have generally used curvier Naskh if they used it at all; more typically, Ruq`ah, Diwani, Thuluth or Kufic would be used as display scripts in Arabic. (It also appears—highly improbably—as the script for what was meant to be graffiti in one scene.)
• In Memoriam: "Hereditary Principles" is dedicated to Katherine & Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, the Queen's developmentally disabled cousins. She was told they were dead but instead had been institutionalized for decades by her mother's side of the family.
• Irony as She Is Cast:
  • Both Tobias Menzies and Josh O'Connor have admitted to being republicans despite playing members of the Royal family. O'Connor almost didn’t audition for the show because he felt like playing a prince would be a betrayal of said republican beliefs.
  • The last time John Lithgow played a Fake Brit, it earned him a Golden Raspberry Award nomination, but in this show as Winston Churchill, it conversely earned him acclaim including Emmy Award and Golden Globe nominations, Lithgow most definitely had years of practice.
  • PM John Major is a character notably Younger Than He Looks (famously having premature gray hair) played by Jonny Lee Miller, an actor Older Than He Looks. Miller has more or less the same age Major had while being PM,^note Miller was born in 1972 and was around 50 when the season featuring him premiered in 2022, while Major was born in 1943 and assummed the office of PM in 1990 at 47, and yet he still looks the younger out of the two.
  • Four actors cast as senior politicians (Churchill, JFK, LBJ, Major) played serial-killers before in Dexter. Make what you will of it.
• Lying Creator: As relayed by Josh O'Connor (Prince Charles), he was told by the producers (prior to season 3) that the show would absolutely not be recreating the infamous tampon phone call between Charles and Camilla. It is recreated almost in its entirety in season 5. Even counts as something of Exact Words; his version of Charles didn't recreate the phone call, but after the role was recast with Dominic West for Season 5, that version did.
• Method Acting: John Lithgow stuffed cotton in his nostrils to help make his voice more nasal, as Churchill's was.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Harold MacMillan was both Housing and Defense Minister under Churchill, so one of the unnamed ministers of the cabinet meetings can be safely assumed to be him, played by an extra. Starting Series 2, he's played by Anton Lesser.
  • John Major first made a small appearance in Season 4 during meetings of Thatcher's government, played by Marc Ozall. When Major takes a much bigger role in Season 5 once he becomes prime minister, he's played by Jonny Lee Miller.
  • Sydney Johnson, as an adult, is played by an uncredited extra in Season 2, by Connie M'Gadzah in Season 3, and by Jude Akuwudike in Season 5.
• Playing Against Type: Matt Smith gained worldwide fame playing the manic all-loving Eleventh Doctor. Here, he goes almost in the opposite direction as the stoic, frequently sour Philip.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: There were rumours that Elizabeth II herself enjoyed the series (some versions of this story even going as far as to elaborate that she watched it in the company of the Countess of Wessex, her favourite daughter-in-law) although she did have issues with the show's liberal use of Artistic Licence – History. Claire Foy, however, is sceptical of this. Matt Smith has reported that a friend of his had dinner with the royal family and asked if any of them watched it, to which Philip (who had already made his dislike of the series public) gave a sharp "Don't be ridiculous!"
• Queer Character, Queer Actor: Gay actor Ben Daniels plays bisexual Lord Snowdon.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Artist Graham Sutherland and King George V are respectively played by brothers Stephen Dillane and Richard Dillane.
  • Prince Charles and Prince William are played in Season 5 by Dominic West and Senan West, who are also father and son in real life.
• Reality Subtext: Jared Harris had a cold while also playing the ill King George.
• Recycled Script:
  • The dialogue for the audiences between Elizabeth and her prime ministers are lifted almost verbatim from the equivalent scenes in The Audience, Peter Morgan's last work before The Crown.
  • "The Balmoral Test" features the exact same stag hunt metaphor as in Morgan's The Queen.
• Role Reprise:
  • Eileen Atkins had previously played Queen Mary of Teck, wife of George V and mother of Edward VIII and George VI, in the 2002 ITV telefilm Bertie and Elizabeth, which was set from 1920 (the first meeting of the title characters) to 1952 (the death of George VI).
  • Samuel West had previously played Sir Anthony Blunt in the 2003 series Cambridge Spies. Here he plays Blunt as an older man.
  • The fourth season episode, "48:1" has Claire Foy return to portray a 21-year old Elizabeth making her birthday speech to the Commonwealth. She returns again in the Season 5 premiere to christen the HMY Britannia in a 1953 newsreel, and again in the series finale.
  • Olivia Colman returns in the series finale to incarnate middle-aged Elizabeth once more.
  • Richard Roxburgh had once played Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke in the 2010 TV movie Hawke. He returned to play the role for the show in the fourth season episode "Terra Nullius".
  • Prasanna Puwanarajah, who previously played the reporter Martin Bashir in the 2013 film Diana, reprised the role in the fifth season.
  • After a five-year absence following his last episode in Season 2, Alex Jennings returns as the Duke of Windsor for the Series 5 episode "Mou Mou", set in the mid-1940s.
  • After playing Margaret during childhood in Seasons 1 and 2, Beau Gadsdon returns to play a teenage Margaret for her flashback scenes in Season 6 "The Ritz", set during VE Day in 1945.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting:
  • Many noted that Josh O'Connor bears an uncanny resemblance to the real life Prince Charles.
  • Same goes for Emma Corrin and Elizabeth Debicki, who both look quite a bit like the real Princess of Wales, aided by spot-on mannerisms and forlong gazes.
  • Erin Doherty also looks rather uncanningly like the real Princess Anne.
  • In an in-series casting example, actress Viola Prettejohn, who plays the young Elizabeth during flashbacks to 1945 in Series 6 episode “Ritz”, looks unbelievably similar to Claire Foy, who plays Queen Elizabeth in Series 1-2.
• Series Hiatus: A minor example. Filming of the sixth and final season was temporarily paused in early September 2022 following the real life death of Elizabeth II. However, the show's producers had already prepared in advance for the possibility of the Queen passing away during the show's production, even comparing it with Operation London Bridge, the codename for the Queen's funeral plan.
• Star-Making Role:
  • For Claire Foy and Vanessa Kirby in the US, as both were already rising character actresses in their native UK.
  • Series 3 and 4 were this for Josh O'Connor and Emma Corrin. Corrin had a sizeable role in Pennyworth before, but it's the role of Diana, Princess of Wales that made her a star.
• Typecasting: Alex Jennings plays an English royal once again, having done so in The Queen and Liberty! The American Revolution. He would also do so in Victoria (although in that one he's a Belgian royal of German origin, albeit one who married one British royal and engineered the marriage of his nephew to another).
• What Could Have Been:
  • Early plans for the series would have had Felicity Jones as Elizabeth.
  • Paul Bettany was in negotiations to play Prince Philip for the third and fourth seasons, but it fell through due to other commitments. Tobias Menzies was cast to play as Philip instead. Incidentally, he and Claire Foy (Elizabeth II in the first and second seasons) would later co-star in A Very British Scandal.
  • When Josh O'Connor's agent first told him about the project, his first instinct was to not audition because he's a republican and felt like it violated his personal beliefs.
  • While Season 4 was filmed, Morgan changed his plans and announced the show would have just five seasons. A few months later, he reversed the decision and said there would be six as originally planned after all.
• Word of God: As modern controversies like Andrew's friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and Meghan Markle's accusations of racism started to pile up, Morgan gave advance warning that the show wouldn't be covering them, as he didn't feel comfortable fictionalizing any event with less than ten years of historical perspective. However, he did add that he wouldn’t rule out doing a Postscript Season about the period after those ten years had passed.
• You Look Familiar: Bertie Carvel made a brief appearance as Robin Day in Season 2 before being cast years later as Tony Blair.

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