With the last season of “The Crown” about to launch, focusing on the last days of Princess Diana in the early episodes, the show’s performance coaches have opened up about how the cast perfects their portrayals.
As part of the research for the Netflix royal drama, William Conacher said that he and cast members watched footage of the British royals with no volume to catch their mannerisms.
The supervising dialect coach Conacher said, “First thing I say is nobody needs to make an impression and I don’t believe anybody ever has on this show.”
“It’s more about analyzing what the face does, what the mouth does, what the head does, and then letting your voice come through that shape.”
It is a strategy that has paid off. Claire Foy and Olivia Colman, who have played Queen Elizabeth at various periods of her life, have both picked up awards for their performances.
Conacher said, “If we’re talking about the queen, if you don’t open your mouth if you don’t let your lips move much at all, do not tense, just let there be very little distance.”
“Diana opened her mouth quite a lot and she also spoke in a very minor key. These are all little things, but they’re hints as to how you make your voice sound like that character without actually changing your voice.”
Movement coach Polly Bennett worked with actors “on how their physicality operates” in each season.
“That can be everything from idiosyncratic movement … so that’s the things that we might broadly understand as Diana’s tilting head or Prince Charles’ slight ‘underneathness’ of his head.”
Season 6, released in two parts on November 16 and December 14, starts in the summer of 1997 before Diana, the first wife of now King Charles and the mother of Prince William and Prince Harry, was killed in a car crash at the age of 36.
Season 5 actors Imelda Staunton, Dominic West, and Elizabeth Debicki reprise their roles as Elizabeth, Charles, and Diana respectively.
Bennett said, “Working … with Imelda … this season was to both be talking … how the queen ages and what changes in her body which is everything from she starts wearing glasses and maybe she’s walking a little bit slower.”
“But also looking at the history of the queen and knowing that whenever she walks somewhere, she always knows where she’s going because somebody is telling her.”
