170
R
oyals, like successful actors,
must make do without
some forms of freedom. On
the podium or in the cam-
era’s eye, they live in roles that others
have provided. Within the court and
on red carpets, they’re invested with
the harder task of playing themselves.
Season three of The Crown, Netflix’s
portrait of the rise and reign of Queen
Elizabeth II, starts with the monarch
contemplating her own aging image
on a postage stamp, two enlarged
designs from different eras facing her
like mirror panes—an unsettling
self-encounter echoed at vanity tables
and on vintage TVs through the rest
of the season. If the series’ first two
installments, featuring Claire Foy,
played on the theme of duty, the new
one, starring Olivia Colman, concerns
the pinch of life as a performer. It’s the
story of a woman at the peak of
self-command who works to excel at
all her roles while also—quietly—
remaking the norms of the job.
“It’s easy to just go, ‘Well, how hard
can being the queen be?’ ” Colman tells
me with a chuckle one morning over
breakfast at the Ham Yard café in cen-
tral London. She is dressed in a light-
weight black Cos blouse with a shawl
collar, a slender gold necklace, a deli-
cate gold watch, and jeans. Friendly
with an unexpected layer of self-effac-
ing shyness, she has the disposition of
listening even as she talks. “I think it’s
really hard,” she says of the queen’s
responsibilities. “You can’t just go, ‘I
don’t want to do it today.’ ”
The comment is ironic coming from
Colman. Long known as an actress of
uncanny range—she first emerged as
a comic performer on British TV pro-
grams such as Rev. (about a hapless
vicar) and Peep Show (about feckless
flatmates) yet earned early laurels for
Tyrannosaur, a searingly bleak drama
of trauma and dysfunction—she has
emerged as one of Britain’s leading
screen artists, an actress who never
takes the same shot twice but somehow
strikes true every time. “Whatever part
she plays seems to fit her like a glove,”
says David Tennant, her costar in the
wrenching procedural Broadchurch.
“She plays everything as if she was
born to play it, as if it was written for
her.” After Broadchurch, she drew
praise again in The Night Manager,
playing a pregnant spy while actually
HOMEBODY
Colman takes over the
lead role of Queen
Elizabeth II in Netflix’s
The Crown, which
begins streaming
its third season
November 17. Zac
Posen dress. Cartier ring.
