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NYT Syndicate
It was a match made in casting heaven, but Claire Foy knew from the start that it wouldn't last.
"It was always going to be two seasons," she said of her Golden Globe-winning role as Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix's 'The Crown'."And that's sort of been a weird way to make you cherish it more, because you were only going to have this finite time with these characters." Foy will depart the series as planned at the end of this season, with Olivia Colman ('Broadchurch') assuming the mantle for the next two.
While Season 1 overflowed with pomp and circumstance as a 25-year-old Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1952, Season 2 tosses the crown jewels aside to examine the queen's relationships with her increasingly distant husband, Prince Philip (Matt Smith), and her alienated sister, Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), as London gears up to swing in the early '60s.
"I think she looks around her and goes, 'Things are very different,'" Foy, 33, said without a hint of royal accent or frump, at the Greenwich Hotel in Lower Manhattan after travelling from London, where she lives with her husband, actor Stephen Campbell Moore, and their nearly 3-year-old daughter."The political landscape is changing. Her husband has become someone else. Her sister has become someone else. And she's going, 'Who am I, then?' She has a bit of an identity crisis, I think." Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q. Season 2 finds the queen dealing poignantly with ageing amid the rise of rock 'n' roll in British culture.
A. The story of middle age is quite important. I just don't think that Elizabeth ever thought about the way she looked. It was never significant to her. And then it was, because people judged her. That's what she deals with in this ” that she suddenly realises she's not a spring chicken anymore.
It's especially crushing when all of London, including her husband, perks up when President and Mrs Kennedy visit.
I love those episodes because there were these two couples who were seemingly completely different but shared a commonality, which is that they were the most viewed couples in the world. And they both had tensions in their marriage, and it was fascinating. But it's known that (the queen and Jacqueline Kennedy) didn't have a particularly sisterhood meeting at first. It was a bit dicey.
That voice.
We have an incredible coach, William Conacher, who is in charge of everyone's voice, which gives the show a tone. That's so integral to the character, because the way she speaks and uses her mouth and expresses herself has so much to do with her physicality. It's extraordinary how much the voice is the person and the person is the voice.
You've said that you'd now like to play someone who expresses herself.
That was tongue-in-cheek. But I would love to do something that is all about singing and dancing and just getting it out ” not for anyone else's enjoyment, but just purely for me to sit there and sing Send in the Clowns.
Are you any good?
Absolutely terrible. I can act my way through a song, but I do not have a voice of an angel.
So you won't be singing and dancing as Janet Armstrong, the wife of Neil, in Damien Chazelle's First Man?
I wish, but no, not for me anyway. It's about the moon landing and what drives people to make certain decisions and behave in certain ways.
You're following Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara to play Lisbeth Salander in The Girl in the Spider's Web. Will there be a physical transformation?
We are honouring the character, but at the same time I don't want it to be,"Look at me with my piercings." But what a tribe of women to join. It's such an opportunity to explore the abuse and what it means to be a woman who doesn't conform and who actually has so much pathological behaviour that she's unaware of.
She seems pretty expressive.
I get to be really angry. I need to be angry. (Laughs) Brutally angry to everyone.
It seems you've become Hollywood's latest It Girl. Could you have imagined?
(Grimaces) I have no concept of it, except how lucky I am and how grateful I am and how much I'm just going to enjoy the moment. And I've also, to be fair, seen it from the outside. I've been working for 10 years, I know what it is, and I've got quite a good gauge ” she says.
I'll come back to you in five.
Yeah, I'll be a wreck.
