I get the feeling with this series that they won’t want to try and use actors who have played the parts in major productions before - I sense they want to carve their own path.
Incidentally, QEIII has been announced - it will be played by Imelda Staunton. Not sure if she’s much known in the US (she’s been in a couple of Harry Potters), but she’s very well regarded in the UK. And married IRL to the actor who plays Carlson in Downton Abbey. Her wiki entry.
I think the actor playing Phillip looks a ton like Prince William. Anyone else?
God yes. Sounds like him too.
This is a minor point, but is the elderly man with the mustache, often seen at family events, meant to be the late Duke of Gloucester? He was addressed as Henry when he celebrated his birthday in an early episode, so I assumed that’s who he was, but he’s remarkably healthy and long-lived if that’s the case (the real one died in 1974 after being bedridden for years, but in the show he was still up and moving at the jubilee in 1977).
That’s Tobias Menzies, late of Game of Thrones and Outlander. He has a much different voice inflection in The Crown, which just goes to his tremendous range. Hell, in Outlander, he was able to play two completely different characters which just a change in posture.
I’ve been watching it. So far the timeline is up to 1972, and there hasn’t even been a MENTION of the Beatles. It’s total bullshit. The idea that the biggest pop culture phenomenon ON EARTH at the time, would not even be mentioned in passing by any character in a show set in the UK, is bullshit.
Did the Beatles ever perform for the Royal Family? I’m just trying to think in what context we should encounter anyone mentioning them.
Yeah, at at least one Royal Variety Performance. John’s famous line about “rattling your jewellery” was aimed at the posh seats where the Queen, Queen Mother and Princes Margaret were sitting. The were also all made MBE, so would have met a senior Royal then.
Either someone in the Royal Family would have been listening to them, or someone dating a member of the Royal Family would have been listening to them, or someone working for the Royal Family would have been listening to them, or people in the military surrounding the Royal Family would have been listening to them, or regular people in one of the “let’s show the regular people” scenes like in Wales, would have been listening to them…and EVERYONE would have been talking about them at some point or another. They were the goddamn Beatles. The show went through the whole decade of the 1960s without anyone even saying the word Beatles. It’s fucking utterly absurd, I’m sorry.
Well, they’ve also missed out Princess Anne getting married, and also the incident where she was nearly kidnapped and three people got shot, so…
He’ll always be Brutus to me.
Foy and Smith are so ingrained in my head as Elizabeth and Philip that it took pretty much all 10 episodes before I could get past the wrong-sounding-Muppets vibe. But I liked how the production didn’t shy away from using them in the scenes with old photos. Actually, it was more difficult watching a Tully and a Lannister get along.
Never mind The Beatles, where’s the Sex Pistols? I guess no Silver Jubilee scene, no Sex Pistols scene. But it feels like maybe season 4 could start right where season 3 left off.
Is it just me, or for as great as the actors portraying the royals have been, the portrayals of the US presidents has really sucked? I mean, Michael C. Hall is a great actor, but his Kennedy was terrible. And Clancy Brown was just as bad as Johnson. Like they were just putting out caricatures (and not even good ones), whereas Colman and Menzies and the rest were actually giving life to their roles. Or maybe that was by choice, to make the royals seem more lifelike.
Either way, I’m surprised I was able to resist the urge to binge the whole thing over a weekend, taking it slow at one episode per day. Even Elizabeth couldn’t possibly have that much restraint.
Seriously? Hardly. Just because The Beatles - and popular music - is a big deal for you, it doesn’t mean the rest of the planet agrees. My Mum is the same age as the Queen and had no interest in them in the 60s - she was in her 30s by then, and considered them teenage music.
His acting was fine, but I definitely thought he looked much more like a 29-year-old actor than a 21-year-old Charles in the investiture episode.
I wondered if this is what the Brits feel like when Americans try to portray British historical figures in TV shows. It’s an interesting view, I thought, into how others viewed our Presidents.
Don’t know about that, I thought the Jack Kennedy portrayal was pretty awful too. Don’t know enough about Johnson’s character to know how accurate it was, which is probably closest to the truth.
I often wonder that myself.
Somehow I missed a bunch of season 2 eps so missed the JFK storyline, but Clancy Brown’s LBJ was delightful. I’m about as familiar with his persona as the average Brit (as in, not very) so in my mind. he’s always been the buffoon that CB portrayed him as.
I’d imagine they would default to their stereotype thoughts as to who these people were. Just like I’d imagine a US show depicting Prince Charles may be ridiculous stereotyped to British folk.
Churchill seems to be someone that both sides of the pond seem to depict similarly - though British portrayals show his curmudgeon-ness and elitism a bit more.
Maybe, but Hall and Brown are both American so I wouldn’t have expected from them such one dimensional (imo) portrayals. It looks like the directors of their respective episodes are both British, so maybe that take on them was indeed a purposeful direction.
LBJ was even "cruder in real life. He’d do things like hold staff meetings while on the toilet, nicknamed his penis “Jumbo”, went skinny-dipping in the White House pool with his male aids (not so unusual for the time period), and once gave an interview with male reporters on Air Force One while changing this clothes.