Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ aspires to cinematic heights to retell royal history

By David Friend, The Canadian Press

TORONTO – Playing young Princess Margaret in Netflix’s high-budget Royal Family saga “The Crown” carries with it a certain responsibility.

Vanessa Kirby wanted to ensure she got the part right, so she undertook a research marathon that spanned every scholarly text and salacious tabloid page-turner she could dig up on the Queen’s sister.

“I have to say the (tabloid) one was particularly useful,” Kirby admits.

“(They) got first-hand accounts from people that were in the rooms with her, from butlers to friends — they all come out of the woodwork eventually.”

Stepping behind the closed doors of Buckingham Palace is the lure of “The Crown,” which debuts Friday on Netflix. The 10-episode first season of the series recounts the early years of Queen Elizabeth II, starting with her wedding day in 1947.

Kirby says her self-assigned reading list helped her understand Princess Margaret’s personality, but she eventually had to reckon with the divide between factual books and TV’s fictional tale.

“You think, ‘Am I trying to be this person or trying to embody the spirit, soul and essence of them?'” she says.

Actor Jared Harris, former star of “Mad Men,” says playing King George VI came with its own challenges. He decided to channel his own version of the man, rather than attempt to replicate history to a tee.

“All that research is intrinsically helpful as long as it fires the imagination,” Harris says.

“My attitude to these things is you’re not doing the real person, you’re doing the writer’s version.”

“The Crown” was created and written by Peter Morgan, who previously won praise for bringing an even-handed humanity to the Royal Family in “The Queen,” the 2006 film that won Helen Mirren an Oscar in the title role.

Here Morgan gets a bigger canvas to explore the Royal Family and how its modern day legacy came to fruition.

“The Crown” is reportedly the most expensive Netflix original series produced to date. Sections of Buckingham Palace were painstakingly rebuilt inside England’s production hub Elstree Studios, while location filming spanned the United Kingdom.

Producers scoured the region for the most cinematic country houses and old estates to substitute for famous places like the Queen’s Sandringham Estate and Balmoral castle, the Royal Family’s Scottish holiday home.

But Harris, who also starred as Prof. James Moriarty in the 2011 film “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,” says with only so many historical spaces to film in, he sometimes felt a sense of deja vu while shooting “The Crown” on location.

One day, Harris realized he was standing in the same lavish space he tread years before as Moriarty, Holmes’s famous adversary.

“I looked (around) and went — ‘This is Moriarty’s office!'” he laughed.

Diving into royal history left both actors with differing attitudes towards the public’s obsession with the infamous family.

Harris ponders how the “mystery of the crown” keeps people entranced with every kernel of gossip. Kirby has taken a more vested interest in the fodder.

Before “I was apathetic,” she says. “Now I’m completely obsessed with all their lives.”

Follow @dfriend on Twitter.

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