The Crown focuses on Queen Elizabeth II as a 25-year-old newlywed faced with the daunting prospect of leading the world's most famous monarchy while forging a relationship with legendary Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill. The British Empire is in decline, the political world is in disarray, and a young woman takes the throne....a new era is dawning. Peter Morgan's masterfully researched scripts reveal the Queen's private journey behind the public facade with daring frankness. Prepare to be welcomed into the coveted world of power and privilege and behind locked doors in Westminster and Buckingham Palace....the leaders of an empire await.
- Written by Netflix
Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ Tracks a Royal Marriage
The first
season of the new Netflix series ‘The Crown’ looks at Prince
Philip and Queen Elizabeth II during the early years of their
marriage
By CARYN JAMES
Updated Oct. 26,
2016 11:38 a.m. ET
“He was swoon
handsome,”Peter Morgan says of the young Prince Philip, Duke of
Edinburgh. “He put the D into dashing, and the D into dangerous
because he was an outsider, disrespectful, uncontainable.”
Today the
95-year-old Philip is a fixture of the British royal family. But the
sumptuous Netflix series “The Crown,” created and written by Mr.
Morgan, shatters that image. Here Philip is a brash, forward-looking
young husband and father, in the rocky early years of marriage to the
woman who soon became Queen Elizabeth II. “She is our ‘A’
character, but their marriage is our ‘A’ story line,” Mr.
Morgan says.
All 10 episodes of
season 1 arrive on Nov. 4. The series could run for six seasons, each
covering a decade, but so far Netflix has ordered two.
Mr. Morgan had done
plenty of research on Elizabeth, now 90 years old, but says he knew
far less about her husband. He wrote the film “The Queen” (2006)
and the play “The Audience” (2013), both with Helen Mirren as the
monarch. England’s royal family has been the basis of a number of
films, including “The King’s Speech” (2010), with Colin Firth
as Elizabeth’s father, King George VI. “The Crown” deals with a
range of personal and political issues during Elizabeth’s reign.
The budget for the
series—$110 million for two seasons—is more than double the cost
of a typical drama, but not unheard-of. HBO’s “Game of Thrones”
and Netflix’s “The Get Down,” for instance, cost more. The
series is pricey partly because it was shot in grand English
locations standing in for places like Buckingham Palace and
Westminster Abbey, and because many scenes are filled with jewels and
horse-drawn carriages. Such rich period details—as well as story
lines exposing tensions within the aristocracy—have propelled
fictional series such as “Downton Abbey.”
Season 1 follows
Elizabeth (Claire Foy, who played Anne Boleyn in the series “Wolf
Hall”) from the day before her wedding in 1947, through her
accession to the throne five years later, and on to 1955, with
occasional flashbacks to childhood. Philip (Matt Smith) appears
early, renouncing his titles as prince of Greece and Denmark. (His
family had been exiled from Greece when he was a child, and he grew
up on the Continent and in England.)
Princess Elizabeth’s
marriage to this relatively poor foreigner isn’t a match anyone in
the royal family wants, except for the strong-willed bride. She is
conspicuously head over heels. “When the number one person is
completely intoxicated with love, and subservient to a dangerous
element, that makes managing the dangerous element very tricky,”
Mr. Morgan says. “Philip would snap and say what he thought. The
courtiers didn’t know how to manage him.”
Philip bristles
against changes that hit him like personal affronts. When Elizabeth
becomes monarch, he must give up his naval career. He resists the
idea that at her coronation ceremony he must kneel to his own wife.
Mr. Smith (best known for his recent run as “Dr. Who”) says,
“That’s the great conflict about Philip—the desire to be the
alpha, but to constantly be usurped and emasculated by his wife
because she is the queen of England.”
Mr. Morgan stays
true to historical facts, but invents intimate moments. He says of
the royals and their marriage, “Sometimes writing them as complex
adults that work through problems is more respectful than pretending
everything is hunky-dory. Given that we all know they end up
together, it gives you the license to imagine and color in.” When
Elizabeth offers her husband what seems like a make-work role as head
of the committee planning her coronation, Philip snarls, “There’s
no need to matronize me.”
But the series also
depicts Philip pushing for a more modern coronation. In reality, it
was due to his influence that the ceremony was televised, Mr. Morgan
says, “against the wishes of the old gray hairs,” but wisely
bringing Elizabeth closer to her subjects. This Philip can be a
bumbler. On a royal tour, he compliments an African wearing a tribal
crown: “Like the hat.” He stumbles home drunk after carousing
with friends. “They’re the things that make him utterly likable,”
Mr. Smith says of these missteps. “They humanize him and make him a
normal person in an abnormal world.”
In that
anything-but-normal world, Elizabeth faces an intensifying tug of war
between duty and emotions. She is fond of the aging Winston Churchill
(John Lithgow), whose party is trying to nudge him out of his second
go-round as prime minister. Princess Margaret wants to marry a
divorced man, Peter Townsend (Ben Miles). As head of the Church of
England, the queen cannot permit the love match.
The Duke of Windsor,
who as King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936, is a figure of
both pathos and wit. Mr. Morgan’s lines include the snarky
nicknames the duke used behind his family’s back. The queen mum is
Cookie. The queen is Shirley Temple. Philip he calls the Foundling.
No comments:
Post a Comment