THE CROWN | Variety Streaming Room

who stars as princess margaret and series director jessica hobbes thank you all so much for being here thank you congratulations to everyone on your emmy nominations you're in the third season of a great series and it just keeps getting better but peter do you feel any pressure going into a new season when every season before is so heralded well it's very kind of you to put it like that i i i i'm sort of still in the tunnel and um i'm sure the other show runners you talk to will say the same you're in a sort of sleep deprived baggy-eyed tunnel and uh and you you don't really have the chance to step back and and reflect about it which is probably quite good because i don't have a chance to get nervous about it you're so busy doing what you're doing and um and and the joy of it i suppose is that there is such a tight group of you and it's such a it's such a team endeavor so uh i i'm not in it alone i'm curious for our two new cast members um when you were approached about joining the crown were you already a fan and and what were sort of your feelings about stepping into these uh already you know established roles on such a beloved show well i was a big fan of the show so i was terribly excited i very rarely spent an awful lot of time considering anything so i said yes and uh um i've had an absolute ball i really genuinely have and we've finished obviously season four now and when suddenly you feel really sad that it's not going to be us anymore we had such a oh such a beautiful time every day going to work was an absolute treat really loved it i felt very nervous because you know claire foy was in my head still is the queen elena for you oh i had i was very nervous i was very very scared um and i was a big fan and um like holly i knew that the standard was very high and it was much beloved the show and i was very conscious that sometimes you you know people fall in love with the actor and the face and i just thought what are they gonna they're gonna feel betrayed by us two popping up and taking this on and um i love the fact that we've been employed to be our actually we weren't originally to be our age i was going to say because we we had to pretend to be a lot younger so we were on crash diets and um but um but i love more peter's sort of thing was that you really can't beat agent you can you know you slap on some rubber onto our faces and make the creases but the dents inside that's something and the experience of actually living is something that we're employed to do so um and uh but it wasn't until i saw peter script that i thought i got to do it um because in abstract i thought i needed to point it and i knew any actor knows that you only need to be as good as what's on the page and um and now two years on it's funny when you said newcastle i feel like we're very much the old cast yeah very sad left it's two years of our life it's just gone and i felt it's one of the best experiences of my life yeah on many many levels but that's not because you know this is this is genuine feeling and not just empty compliment but um it was such a brilliant and expert team and peter's right it's his name is absolutely it's out of his he's the main architect of it but there's such an amazing team that supports us all and i've never felt so supported and um so well run it was like being in a in a high club you know um just as a great cruise ship holiday for two years and now back to life where um anyway and also there's a great luxury i'm banging on a bit um but the great luxury of being able to have to be honest to be with the same character for two years over a two-year period because obviously we're off and on but that's never i've never had that before i've never had and nothing beats time and allowing it just to sit and peter said something do you remember you said that after the second read through he said god you're so much better this time around all of you you're right but because we've lived with them for a year you know we're not so anxious and also we can trust ourselves to further characters for the queen for margaret for prince philip to show up on the day because at the beginning you're just like going jesus where are you when we first started coming when we first had the idea all of us about doing it and and that it would be two seasons um per cast as it were to travel through 60 years so it's about 10 10 years a season approximately is the speed at which this train is traveling and um i hadn't thought through uh really in any detail it um i just knew that you'd have to have other actors as people get older and um and and i felt i i felt nervous about whether you know when you passed the bat on whether whether an audience would accept it i i'm now confident because of what uh you know olivia and helena and their fellow cast members have done that people will accept it um but i think there's something quite interesting about it for the actors i think i think that sort of two years is long enough for it to feel like a like a really permanent job and it's short enough not to drive you crazy and and you know everyone else crazy yeah i i i i can see i can see it's a pleasure to watch the sort of you know um then go through the business of trying to get to know their character understand their character and that that keeps all the rest of us all quite excited on our toes as well and so it rejuvenates us so where we wouldn't otherwise have had a third season slump of energy perhaps or a sense of fatigue the fact that you're suddenly surrounded by a whole lot of new people who are quite nervous it makes you feel like that too and and and and it makes the process of the long distance run much easier and and more pleasant and jessica in a sense you're also new to the show this season you you came in and you directed two episodes including the finale which i feel like is a lot of pressure to put on somebody who's who's sort of new to the show it's true although peter was very generous he gave us choices about which episodes and i loved this episode in particular and i wanted to work with helena i'd work with olivia before which was just a joy so i knew that was going to be good but i was really kind of aching to work with helena and when i read what peter had written i just thought this is brilliant it was that in the astronauts one with a pad together and i just thought two of them were exceptional scripts so i was very keen were you also a fan of the series coming into it yes well i'm going to be really honest before i actually watched it i was i was almost had convinced myself it wasn't going to be for me because it was the hottest ticket in town and everywhere else you were shooting they had all the money they had all the lights and i was like i'm so jealous of what they got to do and then i turned it on and literally you see claire foy's face and then john lithgow appears as churchill and i was like any show that casts him as churchill i'm in it was just and i never looked back i just that first episode for me still has such incredible joy in it it's great peter going into the third season what was it you knew you wanted to highlight there's there's so much material but you also have a couple seasons left how do you decide what period of time to cover and what significant events to cover well the decision about which events to cover is always uh that's quite a long part of the process and so you know the reductive nature of history is such that you you look at a decade and and and the the further away we get from the decade the more we reduce it to about two or three incidents and so for most people the 60s are sort of england won the world cup and uh then there was a sexual revolution and and maybe if you're in the united states jfk was shot in the early part of six so you suddenly think well you know actually let's have let's make a trade-off here between the things that we need to put in the signature events of a decade that you need to put in in order for not for it not to be perverse but then can we try a few different ones so that actually uh you know a decade gets a slightly better hearing uh and you don't just necessarily follow the tried and tested landmark events that define a decade and uh and to do that we've got as it were the prism of going through the the characters in this family yes they are all because it's the queen you know and the royal family they are all they've all got ringside seats for every major event but because each of them has sort of their own private interests and passions you you you can look you can take it in different directions and that's why you know uh because uh uh someone like prince phillip it made sense to me because of what i knew about his character that he would take particular interest in certain aspects of the uh lunar mission which is why i put the apollo uh program or the apollo mission in i would otherwise probably have left it out but i could see a way of telling the story through him and a crisis of male middle age um and and things that you know had been unachieved in his own life um and i suddenly thought that way you can make it both a personal story but also a story about a moment in time or a landmark event in a decade and so forth and olivia and helena uh you guys are so wonderful in these roles and your chemistry with each other is fantastic did you know each other at all before shooting no that one yeah we'd met once before and um both remember yes and we got because we're in hotel yeah that's fine yeah i don't know i remember the dress you were wearing and everything i thought it was a sleeveless black and it had a sort of fishtail thing at the back you remember they just don't have to come over i don't well i'll draw it for you remember um uh but yes and then we met properly at the read through did we having been uh messaging each other and um i think i'd like to say i think we've become lifelong friends we found it very easy i think to get on with each other and uh yeah it became quite systematic and we were sort of it's an apocryphal story i don't know if it's true or not that everybody everybody who's played salieri and everybody who's played mozart over long periods of time ends up hating each other and and and that because because the the parts are are so uh uh uh there's so much opposition and antagonism and rivalry and that it bleed and and i think it's not surprising actually that that both you both the two of you i i've noticed get very close throughout the course glitched vanessa and um what's it claire do they still get on do they talk they still talk all the time they're still very very okay that's good yeah yeah yeah you were heading in a different direction when you started that support that was a terrible paradigm or whatever the word is that was what i mean is what i mean parts can set up an antagonism or an empathy and yes and and uh what's nice is i mean colleen i have never had a sister so um but i've always wanted one so now i got one oh yeah oh it wasn't you know yeah and honestly it wasn't it was singularly i felt very um it was like just jumping into warm water that wasn't only we didn't really have to do much it was just it was i think that's sort of um just a an immediate understanding of the other person yeah and you were properly sister lee in the sense that you did you did antagonize each other you did wind each other up it was great as as characters because i have lots of systems and i felt that you guys really hit that note properly you understood what it was all the gloves are off you can say anything you like to your sister because it's unconditional that that love is their life you can get away with saying and and that's what i love the two of you bringing out the characters you really did particularly in that my problem actually with the season three my problem was we didn't actually have that much to do um in scene-wise it was only like there was this great great scene at the end of uh at the end of the season at the end of that episode but yeah kind of frustrated i thought in my head we were gonna have a lot more and then i think that's rectified in season four there's a lot more of that of their friendship and um a lot of the people that i met who knew margaret who uh told me things said that they were slightly frustrated by the fact that in the with the first two seasons there wasn't enough of the closeness which you now see in episode four there of their of their sister that relationship they were incredibly close and no two um nobody else had that same childhood and yes there were all sorts of conflicts within it but ultimately they were also incredibly close and very yes you know sympathetic and margaret was very loyal yeah very absolutely chose folks when you guys are texting each other i'm i'm curious do uh uh helena is olivia coleman a big emoji user yeah i had a feeling anything organizational if you're doing up a house who knows exactly if i was looking for a lamp shade or something because we do quite a lot apart from act in the in the hair and makeup we're doing because we're mothers and one households um of course we're in production managers so there's a lot of the time where um you know exchanging like uh where did you get that uh that love that if i don't get any more acting work ever again i just want to i want to go and work at virtruvius it's a have you ever seen well i might olivia was also out she's our social hub anything going on goes through olivia i'm just gonna yeah all right she knows what's going on behind the scenes and she organizes everything she's very good at bringing people together aren't you oh that's nice of you jess because uh you are playing real people which you both have experience with um but how do you go about researching your roles and was there anything you learned that surprised you and have either of you ever met your counterparts uh i've met the queen um well when you say you've met the queen you know i mean we haven't sat on a sophie together and had a chat it was in a long queue of people where you you curtsy and you move along you know that was princess anne in the lineup when did you meet the queen uh that was um a few years ago i think uh there was a a film industry evening at windsor oh yeah i didn't think she'd be there and suddenly we all ended up in this sort of queue and i thought i wonder why we're in a big queue i thought it was using the rooms at windsor for a sort of bash and then suddenly we looked around the corner and oh [ __ ] and this this man in epaulets was was telling us what to do just a little chinch trust and uh no don't overdo it and sort of shuffle this forwards it's uh your majesty and then your royal highness and uh and just keep moving keep moving because she had hundreds of people to get through um and that was it so i can't say that's not really a meeting is it but um that counts yeah thanks thanks janelle i think i was at the same do and i met margaret what it was sure if it was that it was when the place had been burnt down and they had been restored so they had a huge industry um drinks and i remember seeing princess margaret who was tiny i mean she was much smaller than me oh no this later than that then because she was already dead when i went yeah i was in about 2014 i think so this must have been history-wise but anyway i think it's probably um 2000 or something and she was very um very small and i went up to her and she um kind of knew who i was because she knew my uncle very well she said and she said oh helena yes you are getting better at acting and you tell me that and i just thought that is so inimitably her which was basically a compliment put down no it wasn't really a compliment was it but it was not really um so yes and um the uh it was a real privilege to meet all that's what um a lot of the friends that knew really knew her and i think they were quite frustrated generally about her reputation in the press they're very very happy to talk to me and and really sort of bring her into the room by because they loved her and they miss her and so they had lots of stories and so i got a real i did i'm pretty um exhausting and um just asking questions um quite difficult and i've done it before playing somebody who's well known because you have to go past what everyone's received sort of opinion is or their prejudice in a way so it's a really very conscious bias you know they've all already worked out what they are and you've got to it's your response at work i feel it's my responsibility to try and find the essence of somebody the true person and definitely margaret who was a victim of like a lot of prejudgment i think and and bad opinion and she was much more complicated than she'd been generally portrayed and even by that book ma'am darling i thought was very mono just like from one point of view so and it was very easy once you started talking to people that in fact there were many many many more facets to her that nobody really wants to know about and in some ways all the positive doesn't really make good good press the two of you um you get i mean the whole cast you get to wear these stunning costumes and i was so thrilled to see that amy roberts was nominated for her work this year yeah how much does that help you get into the character i mean you must feel like royalty wearing those you have any you have any favorite items that you wanted to uh make off with well my favorite item was uh i i liked the clothes we were in scotland but that's that's not they're the least glamorous ones they were jumpers and woolly socks and she probably the queen feels the most comfortable in too yeah yeah sort of dress according to her what she actually likes yeah in a way but i i i do the amy amy and her team and kate make up and her team did three quarters of my job for me you know if i turned up looking like this no one would believe i was the queen so they they do so much for you and then uh well without them it would be impossible to do it they're so brilliant at what they do but i don't think i've been in something where i had a new costume per scene practically there's a lot of standing out a lot of time was in costume makeup so i've gone to know amy very well and said her daughter and um they're indispensable because they've they make your silhouette in all honesty and i think margaret had the problem too is that there's so many rules that the worlds have to you know this obey when it comes to their clothes they aren't necessarily um an expression of the themselves also you'll talk your their job as costumers is to indicate to the to the viewer what year you're in so sometimes you feel like i really don't like pleats and say well you're wearing pleats because that's creative that is the fashion you know and um there was a sort of traditionally often on a job you what you'll do is you build a wardrobe and then from that pick a costume but there was no question of doing that and amy's very forceful and i'm sometimes quite strong-minded because unless i feel right and of course you know what to deliver so we often had crashes and i said can i just wear the same thing i mean she didn't have the real mark right didn't have a huge budget and he said no no absolutely not you're wearing this and just get on with it and it was like um but then i realized that margaret a lot of the time she was that was her uniform you know same with the wig i just thought can't we change it up a bit i mean they wear the same hairdo every time but that's their job they have to be recognizable shapes and icons and i've never been so grateful to a wig ever it's like you pop it on and then you say okay you know we just have to make sure we don't fall over and um it's you know because a lot of the time she was really trust up and um very um it was they weren't actually flattering lines for somebody so short and um and i'm pretty sure vanessa's just a elegant you know she's a a deer of length and elegance and actually margaret and getting to know her she really resented the fact she was short she did everything to make herself taller she had a ridiculous crown for her wedding my high hair went higher and higher she even got the chair you know the the the seat on her in her car raised so she was um yeah visible and her visibility was a problem particularly in crowds because even her ladies and waiting would wouldn't know where she was she was so um she was so tiny and then sometimes the waiter would turn around and hit her by mistake you know she didn't really like uh olivia you've gotten so at home in a crown we've seen you uh in different roles um pulling that off and you wear it so well um i think some something people might not know is aren't those heavy and hard to wear well we have um stage versions they make them so they copy them but obviously they make them in lighter material because the real crown famously sorry yeah so she had to practice um before her coronation just to try and strengthen her neck and sort of you know because she had to sit still for hours wearing and it weighs how many pounds or something it's very very heavy i mean that's really horrible isn't it so no we as a piece of cake but they can dig a bit but um yeah easy uh there's a couple specific episodes i want to talk about um jessica you were nominated for the cree decor which is the finale um what was it like to uh work with these incredible actors but also such a specific time in history olivia laughs yes thank you incredible actor sorry um it was it was one of the things i loved about the finale in particular was we went we were now into the 70s and so i felt we had a lot we had a bit of freedom to let the reins off and also margaret herself was breaking away just in this instance with roddy she was experiencing ex she just wanted to taste that freedom of being on the other side and i thought helena really went for that in the most beautiful way but she was always pulled back by the weight of the position that she's in just by the history and and that the kind of karmic path that she's on she can never avoid and in a way doesn't want to avoid her close association with the crown but i love that it opened all of that up and i thought that was a really fun time to explore it was great and it was just look it's a real gift you get these two in a scene and it's magic it's great at times you're thinking i really should come up with a good note but actually i don't have much more to say no you always have brilliant things yes always bang on with us yeah amazing stop us from mucking about yeah and then actually he turned up on that big scene and we were just like both me and olivia said great why'd you have to turn up on the big scene it felt very good and you were incredibly helpful because you cut half of it do you remember yeah i had no problem cutting half of your that was fantastic writer come in and go we don't need all of this i can see what they're doing it's great and but also you've got actors that can manage that but that doesn't freak them out they're like oh brilliant they saw that as a kind of freedom it was great whereas for some people that's quite hard to make such a big adjustment in the ships peter i've heard that you cast the series before you actually write the scripts is that true um with that not not the first two series and and and i think i'm not sure it's entirely true i i think that there are one or two parts you know like the key parts like the two women we're talking to today i think i think both olivia and helena had been cast while i was still writing um i'm not sure because helena you wanted to see something didn't you you wanted to read something and and so i i think there must have been scripts you know i could i could have obviously said to her look you've seen two seasons of it and either you like it or you don't you didn't say that i mean what because you sort of just just from a workload point of view you're sort of saying wait a minute wait do i now have to write all 10 episodes before you say yes because we need to you know you need to obviously have some security about who the actors are going to be you know the key roles you don't want to lose the people that you most want and in both cases they were our first choices and so you know we we didn't want to risk not getting our first choices and and uh and thanks to how brilliant their work is um there are now actors for season five and season six who are signing on without seeing script because i'm frantic now now we are casting people out and um not one of them has had the bad manners you send me some scripts please um but um uh so so yes the in answer to your question i mean yes we we cast some people apart from helena von carter who of course was obstinate and critical there's more evidence actually look at it now i can suddenly see it from your point of view and it's incredibly insulting but it was more difficult than me thinking well how can i can i play her and then i saw on the page was like yeah and it was quite a girl it's a great actually it's less about being insulting it's more that i just you know i want to try and write them as well as i can and if you're up against actors saying can you please hurry up and get me scripts then you're in a situation where you're yeah you're trying to address it i guess we'll never work again yes we will you guys keep saying that i think you're both gonna work just fine i'm not worried you know when the crown came out in 2016 it was an instant hit and i'm curious why do you think this these stories and this family continue to resonate with people even here in america i say here in america even though none of you are here but i am so well i mean they are extraordinarily well known figures you know and um i and and maybe i hope it's because because it's an easy subject to get wrong let's be honest and and and i'm not uh i mean you know look at me i'm not a monarchist i don't know what a monicas would look like but probably i'd have a hanky with here in my shirt pocket and i'd have billowing gray hair and i'd speak slightly differently but but the um uh there's something about the combination about using this particular family almost as avatars uh uh as a as as you know as a way of traveling through um the second half of the 20th century and and that's what connects um us and our parents and our children for not just not just in this country but in every country in the world the queen has been a sort of a constant a constant figure everybody you know she has been one of the great you know public figures certainly of the last you know 70 80 years and uh and and so she's connective tissue for all of us internationally you know don't forget there are three billion people in the commonwealth of 53 countries um that you know of whom she's at least notionally the head of state or or you know um so um that's a lot that you know that's a lot of connective tissue and and and and then if you put that to one side and all the historical significance of it um it is just a family drama and and a family you know and and and the the most satisfying to me anyway the most satisfying long-running shows are the ones that are about families whether you know whether it's the sopranos or succession or whatever it is you know the the the the internal wranglings within a family um you know whether it's proust or whichever way you want to go it's it's it's a joy for a writer and and and that's they they have exactly the same problems as any other multi-generational family and yet they're quite different to any other multi-generational family because of of what the responsibility is for the person at the very center of it and of course there's also that thing uh not dissimilar to succession in fact uh in in some ways this show could be called succession two um you know uh it is about the murderous in you know desire uh almost of one person to have and and also when i thought when helena was talking to us then about princess margaret feeling small and always wanting i don't think she'd have been she's no big she was not really any smaller than her sister and her sister has never i i do i do think yeah i think it has a lot to do with being second and not being queen wanting a few extra inches to be noticed that in itself is a sort of a a succession issue yeah i would like to point out that you were first so technically you would be succession one and it would be succession [Laughter] it's just a family and power dramas within a family and we and they and none of us will be the first and the last people to do it that will go on being the staple of hopefully great drama you know um forever and ever people uh are are so fascinated by this character who's also a real person do they want to sort of talk to you about queen elizabeth ii uh well i don't go out so that that and um my friends don't so the only people i see are my friends only when we do press people ask me questions about it because uh i i don't know what the answer we're making up you know it's a we're making a drama with these people as a sort of um starting point i suppose so if i if i was answering questions on her behalf i would be totally making it up because i um so yeah no people don't ask me unless unless it's in this system situation is the most reluctantly famous person in the world anywhere in public she's under about seven baseball caps she's hunched she's almost like meticulously and it's like total embarrassment i've never actually it was it's a phenomenon in itself so have you have you found have you found mark wearing helps i love mask wearing it she likes bicycles and masks she puts a helmet on the mask on and she's everywhere she's everywhere you can't stop her she's gone shopping she's doing everything now and uh the mask is the master's yeah i absolutely love it because my baseball cap sunglasses because it's summer and a mask i can go anywhere it's lovely so i've been in shops for the first time in years my husband's very grateful because i always please can you go i don't want to go to the shop so um whole new lease of life uh before we go um i know that you've already filmed season four um is there anything you can preview uh that we can expect from that season well i mean yes i can i mean you know jess was also absolutely instrumental to that season and she also uh directed the finale of that one um it is very much the queen in a um in a sandwich of uh uh margaret thatcher on the one side princess diana on the other and margaret just one step off as well so it's uh it's it's a it's a season full of very strong women i cannot wait how did you get jillian anderson for margaret thatcher she's amazing how did that happen well actually i'll tell you how that happened that really that happened with me thinking you know oh my god is this mad and then i so i asked her i asked if she if i uh uh you know uh i i asked if i thought she could do it and and with the really good actors the really really good actors they will just tell you that that you know i might think they could do it but if they can't if they couldn't do it and and no not no great actor that needs work will want to fall flat on their face and so she said let me think about it and then about a week later she said i think i can do it and so then i so then i knew she could do it but i didn't want the cast or any of the fellow producers to think this had been in some way you know cooked up here at home and uh and so i rang nina gold our casting director and i said i've had an idea for thatcher jillian what do you think and because if if she and then she said i think it's a fabulous idea and i said would it be your first idea because if it isn't your first idea we must explore what your first idea was and she said and she again took a couple of days and came back and said julian will be her first idea and you can't persuade nina any many uh uh so actually in the end julian would have been our first choice with or without any connection i mean she was the best choice she was unbelievable nominal i cannot wait um i want to congratulate you guys on a fantastic third season thank you so much for being here today thank you for joining us well thank you thank you to see you all

Channel: GA Edits

Views: 30,614

Keywords: #thecrown, #netflix

Id: 2vZaZMfY_Io

Length: 37min 13sec (2233 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020