With the final season of The Crown about to launch, the show’s performance coaches have lifted the lid on how the cast perfect their portrayals of the British royal family.
As part of the research for the Netflix drama, William Conacher says he and cast members watched footage of the royal family with no volume to capture their mannerisms.
“First thing I say is nobody needs to do an impression and I don’t believe anybody ever has on this show,” says Conacher, the supervising dialect coach.
“It’s more about analysing what the face does, what the mouth does, what the head does, and then letting your voice come through that shape.”
“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,” Conacher explains.
“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.”
“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,” Bennett says.
“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.”