Imelda Staunton talks about the end of The Crown

The Crown is dead; long live The Crown. After six seasons of reimagining the epic reign of Elizabeth II, creator and executive producer Peter Morgan has decided to bring down the curtain on his divisive Netflix royal drama series, penning what many have described as a love letter to the longest-reigning British monarch in history.

In the series finale—titled “Sleep, Dearie, Sleep,” named after the bagpipe lament that played at the real sovereign’s funeral in 2022—Queen Elizabeth II (played by Imelda Staunton) contemplates her future on the throne after being tasked with planning her own funeral ahead of her 80th birthday. Elizabeth’s internal conflict over whether to abdicate and cede control as head of state to her first-born son, Prince Charles (Dominic West), or to continue serving as the Queen for the rest of her life, manifests in imagined conversations with her younger selves. Claire Foy and Olivia Colman, who both won Emmys for their portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II during the first decades of her reign, reprise their roles in the finale, offering two different arguments for Staunton’s Elizabeth to mull over in the lead-up to Charles’ wedding with Camilla Parker Bowles.

On a recent video call from London, Staunton spoke with The A.V. Club about her approach to embodying the resolute strength of the late Queen.

Imelda Staunton: I have to do the script that Peter Morgan writes, and I don’t think you can play zeitgeist. I think you just have to do what the script demands. It is a time where there was a lot of turmoil at the palace, so dramatically that was very interesting to play. One episode is mainly Princess Margaret and the Queen completing that beautiful journey of the two sisters, and that was really wonderful to play. So I think in a way, you are right about it being the queen that people really remember, but you can’t let that interfere with what you are doing because I’m filming scenes from 1997 now, so it’s history. It’s recent history, but it’s still history because this series finishes in 2005, so it’s 20 years ago. But it’s interesting to be playing something that so much of the public feel that they have [ownership over the Queen]. “It didn’t happen like that. It wasn’t like that because I was there,” which you can’t say about a film about Elizabeth the first. So it’s wonderful to be involved with a project that is maybe slightly contentious and people feel that they have got a hold on this particular part of history.

AVC: To your point, the eighth episode of the final season, titled “Ritz,” centers on the final days of Princess Margaret [Lesley Manville], who suffered a series of strokes before she died. Elizabeth and Margaret’s relationship has always been one of the cornerstones of The Crown, and they were effectively one of the lives of each other’s lives. What did you enjoy most about bringing that dynamic to life with Lesley, and what did you want to convey in Elizabeth and Margaret’s final conversations together?

IS: I think you’re right. In a way, it’s what Peter Morgan wanted to convey, and I think he wanted to get back to the two women rather than the Queen and a princess. Those two women had a checkered history because of Elizabeth’s refusal for Princess Margaret to marry Peter Townsend. There’s a difficult situation that they had to deal with there, so it was really satisfying to be able to play two sisters, and we realized that this is an episode about retrospection and just looking back on their lives and what they still mean to each other, even though they’ve been through really difficult times. And for Lesley and I, who’ve known each other a long time, it was a very satisfying episode to do.

AVC: What do you think Elizabeth sees when she sees the old footage of her childhood and of her early years as a mother?

IS: That’s a good question, because I think it’s both joyous and sad. I think she probably felt very proud of her parents, of her sister, of the life that she has led, and I mean pride with a small p. I think she was looking at the people that she loved and the young love between her and Philip, and the love between her sister and the love of her father. So it was a loving journey looking back.

AVC: The Crown has always been known for recreating key moments from the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, and this period, from the 1990s to the early aughts, was particularly tumultuous for the Royal Family. There’s been a video circulating of you recreating the televised speech that the Queen gave in the days following the death of Princess Diana, and the side-by-side comparison is almost eerie. What did you want to convey in that speech?

IS: I worked really hard on trying to do that speech, but also, it was great because we didn’t have long to do it. And when I came into the room, much like you see in the scene, she just walks into the room and the cameras are there getting ready and [they said], “Thank you, Your Majesty,” and that was it, so I didn’t talk to the actors. I just came in and said, “Good afternoon.” I thought that would help with the tension around. And afterwards, of course, we all said hello, but I just thought, “Let’s try and have this awkwardness for real.” And they’d never met the Queen, so she wouldn’t go around shaking their hands. She would just come. She knew what she had to do, and she just delivered the speech without any fuss, without any sort of mayhem around it.

AVC: By the end of the series, Queen Elizabeth II is dealing with loss and grief in her own way, and she’s beginning to contemplate the end of her own life and her future as the monarch. How did you want to calibrate your performance to show that, while the Queen may not always display her feelings in public (or even in private), she still has those feelings behind closed doors?

IS: Well, that’s the challenge, isn’t it? Playing someone who probably doesn’t know how to access her emotional journey. And I think that’s quite clear in the script that she doesn’t sit down and cry about things. She spent her whole life holding things in to present this constant person who doesn’t show emotion, because that’s not what the job is about. The job of Queen is to be there, to be constant, to be reminding people that things are all well, [such as] the Queen Mother visiting bomb sites during the war. [The members of the Royal Family] reassure people. So it was lovely to have an opportunity, throughout the final from episodes seven, eight, nine, and 10, to show her being slightly more thoughtful about her life, because I think she was a very selfless person, that she didn’t just think about herself all the time because she had to think about everyone else. So to be given an opportunity to be slightly living in the realm of self-reflection, which is not something she does very much, I think, was a little tiny little window into that part of her.

AVC: You’ve previously mentioned that you were surprised to learn about the Queen’s relationship with her faith, which gave her a sense of duty and self-possession, and that relationship actually informed and became an anchor for your own performance. Did you have a particular approach to embodying her physicality?

IS: I don’t know how you do it, but I think just by doing it somehow, you know she has that strength. She’s not going to explode. She’s not going to scream and shout. She’s not going burst into tears. And it’s a really, really satisfying characteristic to be someone who, [in spite of] everything around her, she just can bring it down to sort of like a Dalai Lama inner piece. I think she certainly had that, and I loved playing that because you give nothing away, and that’s really, as an actress, it’s very satisfying to try and do that.

AVC: The Queen died while you were shooting the sixth and final season, and some people from the creative team said Peter chose to change the ending of the show as a result. The Crown was always going to end with a look at the future of the monarchy and Elizabeth’s legacy, but did you ever talk to him about what the finale was going to look like?

IS: I think these [questions] are really for [executive producers] Steven Daldry and Peter Morgan—they make the decisions. I think they wanted to say thank you and goodbye to her, and that is quite strong within this episode. We’d never had an episode 10 at the read-throughs, we only went up to 9, and the Queen had died, so it was up to them. I think they wanted to do something that was pertinent to what had recently happened.

AVC: I was going to ask if there had ever been a meeting of the Elizabeths in real life, since you shared this role with Claire Foy and Olivia Colman. But in the finale, Claire and Olivia both reprised their roles as the younger Elizabeths, who give the older Elizabeth different perspectives about her potential abdication from the throne. Was that the first time you had met them?

IS: Yeah, that was the first time, so it was very, very nice indeed. I think we were all very grateful that they wanted to do that, so I think it’s a tribute to both of them, and it was quite right that they should be there to celebrate the work that they had done.

AVC: Given all the time you have spent imagining what it may have been like in her shoes, have you found it difficult at all to let this iteration of Queen Elizabeth II go? What lessons will you take away from playing her?

IS: I think with every part you play, it’s always living in your metabolism somewhere. But I think what I will cherish is her stillness, her diplomacy, and her sense of duty—those sort of things that are just on the inside. There’s nothing showy about her, and I like that. [She’s] someone who just isn’t looking for any affirmation; she’s just continuing down this road that she promised to go down all those years ago. I’ve done stage roles where I’m playing the loudest, brashest person who’s off the scale crazy, and then to condense it down to someone who is very still is really, really satisfying.