Prepare your best clothes, unfold the red carpet and sound the trumpets, as a new queen occupies Buckingham Palace. In reality, Elizabeth II is still the British monarch, but Netflix’s successful series The Crown, which tells the story of the sovereign’s life and her family has changed a lot. Based on real facts, it has just launched its third season.
We compared the similarity between the actors and the people they perform in the last ten episodes, which cover the period from 1964 to 1977 during the reign of Elizabeth II. At the end of this article, you will find a bonus with a summary of the protagonists of the last two seasons, compared to real life characters.
Olivia Colman — la Reine Élisabeth II
The monarchy suits Olivia Colman pretty well. The British actress won this year’s Oscar for Best Actress for her performance of Queen Anne of England in La Favorite and now she plays Elizabeth II. A wig, a little make-up and a handmade wardrobe were enough to make her the current sovereign of the United Kingdom, replacing the actress Claire Foy.
Tobias Menzies — le Prince Philip
The monarchy suits Olivia Colman pretty well. The British actress won this year’s Oscar for Best Actress for her performance of Queen Anne of England in La Favorite and now she plays Elizabeth II. A wig, a little make-up and a handmade wardrobe were enough to make her the current sovereign of the United Kingdom, replacing the actress Claire Foy.
Helena Bonham Carter — la Princesse Margaret
Curious fact about Helena Bonham Carter: in The King’s Speech, which won the Oscar for Best Film, she played the Queen Mother, and now she puts herself in the shoes of her daughter, Princess Margaret, to replace the actress Vanessa Kirby. The actress of Fight Club and Big Fish told how she got to know the monarch personally, because she was very close friends with her uncle.
Erin Doherty — la Princesse Anne
“She is a very strong and heartfelt woman,” as actress Erin Doherty called Princess Anne, whom she looks a lot like physically. The series shows the second daughter of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip as an autonomous woman, and without giving more details to keep it secret, it also presents a love story that could have changed the course of events.
Josh O’Connor — le Prince Charles
The current successor to the British Crown is young in the third season, and Josh O’Connor is the interpreter. He is an actor who has already made his mark on English television, but who has not yet acquired international fame. To know the details of Lady Di’s romance with him, it will be necessary to wait until the fourth season, even if the one that has just been broadcast introduces Camilla Shand, with whom he had an affair and who is now his wife.
Emerald Fennell — Camilla Shand
The relationship between Camilla and Prince Charles is worthy of a television series: they met in the 1970s, married separately and had children. Then they met again in the nineties and got married in 2005. The beginning of this story is told in The Crown, and the actress who plays the role of the Duchess of Cornwall is Emerald Fennell, who was the scriptwriter for the second season of Killing Eve.
Ben Daniels — sir Anthony Armstrong Jones
A photographer with a reputation for seduction and insolence are some of the characteristics that defined Sir Anthony Armstrong Jones, who was married to Princess Margaret and was played by Matthew Goode in the second season. The English actor Ben Daniels has inherited the role for this third season. He played mostly in the theatre, and we will soon see him in Jupiter’s Legacy, a Netflix series about superheroes.
Jason Watkins — le Premier Ministre Harold Wilson
The period told in this third season is about Harold Wilson’s election as British Prime Minister. He was the fifth person to hold the position under the reign of Elizabeth II (the first had been Winston Churchill, as seen earlier in the series). The role is played by the Englishman Jason Watkins, who recently took on the role of another political figure: MP Emlyn Hooson in the series A Very English Scandal.