The Crown star Claire Foy: We feared viewers wouldn't take to this posh and privileged family

The actress plays Her Majesty the Queen in the Netflix hit
Emma Powell30 November 2017
The Weekender

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Claire Foy has revealed she had doubts whether audiences would take to a drama about the Windsors.

Foy, who plays a young Queen Elizabeth in Netflix hit The Crown, said she was shocked when viewers fell in love with the “incredibly posh” family.

The cast had been taken aback by the enthusiastic response to the first series as they thought that dramatising the royal family was a “huge risk”. Speaking ahead of its return, she told the Standard: “The first series was some sort of wonderful experiment; none of us knew if it would be a success, none of us knew if people would take these characters, who are incredibly posh and privileged, to their hearts. There was a huge risk involved.

“We all felt that The Audience [play] and The Queen [movie] had gone so well and we thought suddenly our one would be the one that brought the house down and was terrible.”

In character: Claire Foy and Matt Smith as the Queen and Prince Philip
Netflix

Foy, 33, continued: “When it came out it was lovely to be involved in something people really enjoyed. Whether it was a critical success or not the audiences really loved it. It was weird and we were all a bit like ‘wow’. It was a surprise — we didn’t know why it had gone down so well.”

Foy returned to her role as the monarch alongside Matt Smith as Prince Philip for the second series, which hints at his alleged infidelity during a five-month solo tour. It also deals with the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Queen’s altercations with journalist Lord Altrincham in the face of the revolutionary Sixties.

The Crown: Season 2 - premiere

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Foy said that she and Smith, 35, tried to tone down their accents for the second series, but were lambasted by their dialect coach. “We have a dialect coach cracking the whip who would never let it slip,” she said.

“We tried every once in a while to ‘common’ it up a bit, but he was there going ‘No!’.”

Foy will hand over the reins to Olivia Colman for the third series, which she said she “can’t wait to watch”. Smith’s replacement has yet to be announced, but he joked that he would like to see Christopher Biggins, 68, play Philip.

The Crown returns to Netflix on December 8.

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