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July 21, 2017
Features

Fit for a Queen

Painstaking craftsmanship gives The Crown its golden hue.

Kathleen O’Steen

Almost from the start, the producers of The Crown knew they had to throw caution aside to fully realize the story they were about to tell.

The Netflix series — an intimate portrayal of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth (Claire Foy), her marriage to Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (Matt Smith) and her rise to the throne after the death of her father — was unlike other programs of its ilk in many respects. For one, Peter Morgan wrote the scripts for the entire first season a full year before production began. Arriving fully formed, like Athena springing from Zeus’s forehead, the scripts offered a definitive blueprint moving forward.

“When you’ve got a writer like Peter, who is a tremendous voice in this country and internationally, you understand that you’ve got something quite special,” says Suzanne Mackie, an executive producer. “So you start the project by aiming quite high.”

Indeed.

The production, with a reported $130 million budget, reunited Morgan with Stephen Daldry, who had directed the West End and Broadway productions of Morgan’s 2013 play The Audience. Dame Helen Mirren starred in that play as Queen Elizabeth, as she had in the 2006 film The Queen, which Morgan also wrote.

As an executive producer who directed four of The Crown’s 10 episodes, Daldry oversaw production and compiled an unrivaled crew of craftspeople and scholars to painstakingly realize their vision of life in the corridors of Buckingham Palace.

“Stephen came very much guns blazing for certain people he wanted in the crew,” Mackie says. “When you’re dealing with the royal family, everything has to be tippity top in quality.”

Among the first hired were costume designer Michele Clapton (who’s won three Emmys for her work on HBO’s Game of Thrones) and makeup artist Ivana Primorac. “These are people who are not only very talented, but also bring a certain gravitas to their work,” Mackie says.

Such decisions would delay filming because Clapton, for one, was busy on Game of Thrones.

Similarly, initial plans to re-create the grand halls of Britain’s storied palaces on a London soundstage — Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, to be exact — were soon found to be lacking in one important respect: “While those studios would offer us the height that you need when you’re re-creating rooms in a palace, production designer Martin Childs very early on said that in addition to height, we were going to have to also offer a depth of vision — halls that lead off to other halls — in order to see these things on a grand scale. It suddenly became, ‘Oh God, we’re going to have to rethink this!’ because he was absolutely right.”

And those scenes of the Windsors vacationing at Balmoral Castle in Scotland? “We’re talking big, rugged, visceral imagery,” Mackie says. “There’s nothing in England that can quite compare” — so, naturally, the entire cast and crew headed to Scotland.

For Mackie, the series is the result of thousands of hours of effort and polish. And work on season two is currently under way. “I would say the lovely surprises have been the people who’ve told us that, after watching one episode, they wanted to sit down and watch all of it. The journey engaged them properly, and that was thrilling.” Here, some of the craft pros discuss the journey and their royal mission:

MARTIN CHILDS

Production Designer

When Martin Childs first met with Stephen Daldry, he brought the director some surprising imagery. “I took portfolio images that weren’t of royal palaces,” Childs says. “Instead, I brought images of England in a state of decay after World War II. It was about telling a story of a phoenix that needed to rise from the ashes. And that phoenix was personified in her majesty, Queen Elizabeth.”

To Childs, it didn’t just seem like one way to tell the story of The Crown — it was the only way. “Out of a very gray London, the idea was that things would begin to sprout. People were coming out of austerity, so we would add color gradually.”

Per his instruction, images of Buckingham Palace and the royal residences in the 1940s and early ’50s looked, well, chilly. “If you bothered to notice, the heaters we had were single-bar electric heaters situated quite close to people in each scene,” Childs says. “It spoke to austerity on the part of this family and a stiff upper-lip-ness.”

As the series production designer, Childs had many iconic moments in the queen’s life to re-create. For example, her wedding in London’s Westminster Abbey was filmed at Cambridgeshire’s Ely Cathedral (built in AD 672). To evoke London’s killer fog of 1952 (nicknamed the Big Smoke), he says, “We found two streets in London that have roofs over them, so we filled them with fog.”

Then there were the rooms of Buckingham Palace. England has a wealth of royal-looking country houses and palaces, many of which are available for filming. The plan to use only Elstree Studios for many indoor scenes quickly expanded to location shoots around town and abroad, as cast and crew traveled to Scotland and South Africa.

“This offered my first chance to build a treehouse,” Childs says of the episode that depicts Princess Elizabeth’s visit to Kenya’s Treetops Hotel, where she and Philip were when her father, King George VI, died in 1952.

The crew built two treehouses, in fact: one high in a tree for exterior shots, and another closer to the ground for interior filming. “Couldn’t have all those hair and makeup people going up and down those precarious ladders for the higher house,” Childs muses.

Perhaps his favorite task was re-creating the queen’s private apartments. “They’ve been documented, but not fabulously so,” he says. “I know there’s a bedroom that belongs to the queen and another bedroom that belongs to Philip. And there are three rooms in the apartment in between their dressing rooms.

"While I don’t know if they can actually see each other from their respective beds, it seemed very good for our story, so I made sure they could. There was a huge significance in that.”

MICHELE CLAPTON

Costume Designer

Research was really important, but I did not want it to dominate the process,” Michele Clapton says, talking about the plethora of costumes that she and her crew created to enhance the series’ royal allure.

With a core staff of about 35 seamstresses, cutters and the like, Clapton set out not only to design such iconic pieces as the queen’s 1947 wedding dress, but also to put her own spin on everyday wear and what it all meant.

For instance, as Elizabeth takes on the title of queen after the death of her father, she must also don the mantle of sobriety. Her sister, Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), portrayed as being often at odds with Elizabeth, had no such compunction.

“Margaret really enjoyed wearing her clothes; her fabrics were bolder, her style was more out of control,” Clapton says. “I would say that Margaret’s clothes looked like she’d had three fittings, whereas the clothes the queen wore looked like she’d only had one fitting. The queen was not passionate about clothes.”

In real life, the material for Elizabeth’s wedding dress was purchased using ration coupons. Clapton and her crew built a replica of the Norman Hartnell–designed gown from scratch — ivory silk, 10,000 seed pearls and a 15-foot patterned train inspired by the Botticelli painting “Primavera.”

“The real wedding dress had been on display at Buckingham Palace to mark the queen’s 90th birthday, but unfortunately it had already come off just before I went to work on The Crown,” Clapton notes. “So I never saw it.”

Her team decided first to print the embroidered design of the original dress and train on the material and then do the finery work. They also had to allow for alterations; Foy had recently given birth and was in the process of losing weight.

One of the more daunting challenges was to give John Lithgow’s six-foot four-inch frame the iconic look of the hunched and elderly prime minister, Winston Churchill, who stood a mere five-foot-six.

Production designer Martin Childs did his part by extending the doorway of 10 Downing Street upward to help foster the illusion, while Clapton’s team built a fat suit to help the actor contort his frame. “John bent so far forward when he was in character that we had to remove areas of the fat suit,” she recalls with a chuckle.

Possibly her favorite character to dress was Wallis Simpson (Lia Williams), wife of Edward, Duke of Windsor. “She was an immensely stylish woman,” Clapton says. “I did not want to re-create all of the Elsa Schiaparelli pieces that Wallis wore.… I did copy one or two. What I tried to do was look across the board at styles she might have worn.

"Replicating is an exercise, but designing, for me, is using clothes to say something about a character, and she was really intriguing.”

IVANA PRIMORAC

Makeup Designer

When people think of Queen Elizabeth, they often think of various images of her on postage stamps — stiff, starchy and studiously reserved. “I felt it was very, very important to portray her as the young girl she once was,” says Ivana Primorac, who has worked on such features as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and repeatedly with stars such as Kate Winslet and Nicole Kidman.

While the Elizabeth portrayed in The Crown starts as a fresh-faced young woman, she becomes more austere than, say, her sister, Princess Margaret. Primorac says executive producer–director Stephen Daldry let her give the characters her own take. “At the very beginning, Stephen encouraged us to not be frightened of dealing with the subject matter, but to work to get it right in a respectful and honest way.”

Primorac first met Daldry in 1998, when they worked on a short documentary titled Eight. They would go on to collaborate on the films Billy Elliot and The Hours.

On The Crown, Primorac and her crew of six often had to ready the actors for different scenes and different points in the characters’ lives, all within a few hours. At times there were up to four directors at work on different scenes in different locations any given day, with some 260 actors who had speaking parts.

“We had to change Her Majesty from young to older in a matter of hours. We had seven different wigs for Elizabeth and five for Margaret,” Primorac says. Of the two women, Margaret wore more makeup, partied more and was freer to flaunt her style. “She was second in line to the throne, so her chances to be head of state were slim,” Primorac explains. “She developed into a very fashionable young woman. She was much more in touch with the world outside.”

Working in Scotland proved particularly challenging: it rained most of the time they were there, shooting outdoors. Even shoots inside some of England’s stately manors were often a “freezing” affair. “We always had to take weather and dampness into account as we set hair.”

The job of turning John Lithgow into Winston Churchill continually evolved, as scenes called for him to grow older, more disabled and more impaired by strokes. “Our research showed how untidy and unkempt some of the prime ministers were — possibly none so much as Churchill. We know how many hats and suits he owned, and it wasn’t that many.”

In addition to a fat suit, Lithgow wore prosthetics on his face, in his mouth (to enhance the look of jowls) and in his nose, to widen it. “He had different sets of teeth for before and after Churchill had his stroke.”

The entire crew was highly motivated to get the story and details right, Primorac says. “I went into this very, very concerned that people would be critical in a bad way. When I started, I had decided that Her Majesty was never going to watch the program, but since it’s become so popular, producers have indeed heard that the royal family is not only aware of the program, but they’ve watched it.”


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 5, 2017

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