After 60 Episodes, Peter Morgan Says Goodbye to
‘The Crown’
Morgan’s opulent Netflix show about the British royal
family set new standards for prestige TV. With the final season ending, he’s
amazed he’s pulled it off.
“I am really surprised that I’ve sustained it,” Peter
Morgan said of creating “The Crown” over the last decade.
By Roslyn
Sulcas
Reporting
from London
Published
Dec. 12, 2023
Updated
Dec. 13, 2023
On a chilly
day in December 2016, Peter Morgan stood on a London street, watching the
filming of a scene from his new television series about the British royal
family.
Half an
hour later, he flopped into a chair, running his hands through his hair. As
both the show’s writer and showrunner, he was already working on Season 2 while
keeping an eye on every detail of Season 1. “I love doing this, but it’s
overwhelming to a degree that isn’t sustainable over a long time,” he said.
“This” was
the “The Crown,” Morgan’s ambitious six-part series that would span most of the
reign of Queen Elizabeth II, exploring national and international politics,
personalities and social change through the prism of an intergenerational — and
royal — family. After 60 episodes, all written or co-written by Morgan, he has
seen it through.
On
Thursday, Netflix will release the last six episodes of the sixth season,
marking the end of a show that has been one of the most watched, argued over
and influential creations in recent television history.
Reminded,
in a recent interview, of those early doubts, Morgan, 60, nodded emphatically.
“I am really surprised that I’ve sustained it,” he said. “I do feel” — he
paused for a while — “astonished, and grateful, and quite emotional that we got
to the end.”
Morgan,
center, with Matt Smith (who played Prince Philip for the first two seasons)
and Claire Foy (who played Queen Elizabeth in the same period) during filming
of “The Crown.”Credit...Alex Bailey/Netflix
When
Morgan, along with the director Stephen Daldry and the producer Andy Harries,
first pitched “The Crown” to broadcasters in 2014, it was with “low
expectations,” Daldry wrote in an email. Netflix was only just beginning to
create original content, and streaming was in its infancy.
The BBC
would have been a natural home for “The Crown,” but “Peter wanted to do
something pioneering and different,” said Suzanne Mackie, who has been an
executive producer on the show from the start. “I remember feeling that the TV
landscape was going to change and we were going to be part of it.”
“The Crown”
was not just part of a shifting landscape, but an agent of change. The show’s
blend of scrupulously researched fact and dramatic fiction, its cinematic
production values and the changing of its principal cast every two seasons, all
set new parameters for prestige long-form television.
“What an
extraordinary thing to have invented: the story of a family using three
different sets of actors. I don’t think it’s ever been done before,” said
Imelda Staunton, who played Queen Elizabeth over the last two seasons.
The final
season, which opens in 1997 with the run-up to the death of Diana, has been the
hardest of all for Morgan to create, he said, not just because the events and
images feel familiar to much of the audience. He also covered some of the same
terrain period in his 2006 film, “The Queen,” which focused on the queen
(played by Helen Mirren) confronting the emotional public response to the death
of Princess Diana.
“I’ve been
dreading this moment,” he said frankly. “How do I repeat myself without
repeating myself?” He decided that if he couldn’t find a convincing Diana, he
would tell the story of the end of her life through Dodi Fayed, Diana’s
boyfriend who died with her in the crash, and his mourning father, the Egyptian
billionaire Mohamed al-Fayed, who yearned for acceptance from the royals and
died this year.
“But once
we had Elizabeth Debicki as Diana, I could enjoy writing her, the life she had,
the mischief,” and her extraordinary ability to connect with people, Morgan
said.
The queen’s
death last year, and watching her funeral, also shifted Morgan’s approach to
the final season, he said, which ends in 2005 with the wedding of Prince
Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles. Elizabeth’s story now concludes with the
monarch celebrating and coming to terms with that union, but also contemplating
her own death and legacy.
“What about
the life I put aside, the woman I put aside, when I became queen?” the monarch
asks herself, in a rare moment of vulnerability.
Daldry, who
directed the final episode, said that in filming it, Staunton “went on an
amazing journey with me in reflecting the queen’s mortality and reign.” For
Staunton, “it was an extraordinary thing to try to inhabit a person who was
completely dutiful all her life,” she said. “You will never see that again.”
By the end
of the show, the queen, Morgan said, “is wrestling with the illogicality of the
system” that required such duty of her. “It’s like religion,” he added. “Why
lead such a powerful institution along irrational lines? But then maybe the
irrationality is the romance. I’ve got no closer to an answer.”
Morgan, 60,
grew up in London, the son of two refugees: his Jewish father had fled Nazi
Germany; his Catholic mother escaped communist Poland. “If I weren’t the son of
immigrants, I wouldn’t have dared write about the British royal family,” he
said. “You have to have to feel one foot outside, one foot inside, to
understand it.”
While
studying fine art at Leeds University, he decided he wanted to work in theater
and came to writing “through a series of accidents.” Now, he said, he can’t
imagine doing anything else.
Morgan
wrote television scripts for much of the 1990s, before gaining wider attention
in 2003 with “The Deal,” a film for British television about the rivalry
between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Then came his 2006 breakthrough with “The
Queen,” directed by Stephen Frears.
In 2013 he
premiered “The Audience,” a play about the weekly meetings between the queen,
again played by Mirren, and her prime ministers, which played in the West End
and Broadway and won several Tony Awards. Writing it, Morgan was struck by the
relationship between the young Elizabeth and the elderly Winston Churchill, and
thought perhaps it could be a film. As he began to explore the idea, and
starting at an earlier point, “I thought, there might be a TV show in this,” he
recalled.
There was.
In a negotiation between on-the-record history and speculative imaginings
characteristic of his work, Morgan has portrayed the royal family as ordinarily
human, with complicated and rich inner lives. Private versus public, tradition
versus modernity, relevance versus mystery: “The Crown” has explored these
issues over the decades of the queen’s reign.
“The Crown”
started “a seismic shift in royal representation onstage and screen,” Mark
Lawson wrote recently in The Guardian, noting that before the series began,
fictional representation of the royals was mostly satirical or comedy. Morgan,
by contrast, depicted “royalty with the quasi-documentary realism of acting and
lavish scenery,” Lawson added.
As a
consequence, the series has come in for opprobrium — particularly over the
final two seasons — from outraged royal-watchers, critics and public figures,
who have called out historical inaccuracies and objected to imagined
conversations and encounters.
But truth
is elusive, and ambiguity is essential for Morgan. “I can only repeat what I
have always said,” Morgan said. “Some of it is necessarily fiction. But I try
to make everything truthful even if you can’t know if it’s accurate.” He quoted
the late author Hilary Mantel: “History is not the past, it’s the method we
have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past.”
The royal
family, Morgan said, “is like a shadow family for everyone, which is why people
have such strong opinions. And it’s right and proper that a dramatist writes
about kings and queens and leaders. It has historically been what we do to make
sense of the world.”
Over almost
a decade, the show has made stars of its young actors, among them Claire Foy,
Vanessa Kirby and Emma Corrin. “It changed my life,” Kirby, who played a young
Princess Margaret, wrote in an email. Morgan, she said, “understands how to
paint arcs, deep emotional journeys — no matter how big or small the part.”
Morgan, she added, always encourages “the unpredictable, the complex, the
challenging.”
Khalid
Abdalla, who plays Dodi, Diana’s boyfriend, in Seasons 5 and 6, said that
before taking the role, he had been uninterested in watching a show about the
royal family. But once he joined the show, he said, he was “amazed by the way
Peter gives a point of view you hadn’t had, and makes you rethink what you
thought you knew.”
When it
came to the characters of Dodi and his father, “it was moving that he gave the
al-Fayeds a cultural space for their grief,” Abdalla said. “There is a
blindness to that side of the story that needs to be called out and recognized,
and Peter did that.”
For each
season, Morgan spent at least six months working with a core team to create a
detailed timeline of the relevant time period, with a research team providing
documents, photographs and other background materials for every scene. “I love
playing with stories like a jigsaw,” he said. “I am very specific and
detail-oriented; if I were a doctor, I would be an elbow man!”
That detail
extends to every character. “Not one character speaks in the same way,” Kirby
said. “That is surprisingly rare in writing — and so true to life.”
“I do feel”
— Morgan paused for a while — “astonished, and grateful, and quite emotional
that we got to the end.”Credit...Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times
Over the
last ten years, Morgan has also, together with the executive producers Mackie
and Oona O’Beirn, overseen every detail of the show’s production. “Making a
show like this is like making ten feature films each season, with the same care
and detail,” Morgan said. “And unlike one film, it just goes on.”
Now that
he’s reached the end, “People keep saying, you must be so happy and proud, but
I’m not yet. I’m still a bit traumatized.” He laughed. “I promise I will smoke
a cigar soon.”
He is
nonetheless on to his next project, which he said he couldn’t talk about yet. “It
won’t,” he said firmly, “involve palaces.”
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