On the day that Queen Elizabeth II died, The Crown was in the middle of filming its final season. The Netflix production publicly announced that it would stop filming for the day — but according to Lesley Manville, the mourning period on set lasted longer than that.
“She passed away when we were in the middle of filming,” Manville, who plays Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret, told MovieMaker at the SCAD Lacoste film festival in France where she received the SCAD Etoile Award for achievement in cinema.
“It’s kind of hard to describe it, really. You feel some level of responsibility because you’re making a program that’s about, principally, her and her family. So yes, it was a sobering, sad, sad moment. And we marked it quite correctly,” she says.
Each season of Netflix’s The Crown follows a different time period in the life of the British royal family, starting when Queen Elizabeth is crowned in 1953 and ending with its sixth and final season in the late 1990s with the death of Princess Diana. The final season will air this fall.
Not only did The Crown pause production on Sept. 8, 2022, when the queen died, but they also paused again on the day of her funeral on Sept. 19.
Lesley Manville Remembers Watching Queen Elizabeth’s Funeral During The Crown Filming
“We stopped filming. We took days off. And then we took another day off,” she adds. “I was filming in Mallorca on the day of the funeral, doing the stuff for Margaret as if she’s in Mustique, where she’d go to her holiday home. So we were filming that in Mallorca, but we took the day off for the funeral. And we kind of — those of us that were there, obviously, we weren’t all there — but we just sort of sat in silence all day really, watching this funeral.”
Manville, a British citizen herself, reflects on the significance of the queen’s death.
“It’s a moment. We weren’t just shooting any old thing. We were shooting The Crown. Yeah. So it kind of goes, ‘Right. Oh, God, this is a bit of a moment in history, really.'”
The Crown Season 6 also stars Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth, Jonathan Pryce as Prince Philip, Dominic West as Prince Charles (before he became King Charles II), and Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana.
Main Image: Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret in The Crown courtesy of Netflix
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