before one is ushered
i n t o t h e P r e s e n c e w i t h a l i s t o f p r e - v e t t e d q u e s t i o n s. H a v i n g s p e n t
most of the previous day immersing myself in an intriguing, very
early cut of The Crown’s third season, in which Olivia Colman
steps into the Queen’s sensible pumps, I am expecting her to be
a daunting combination of both Hollywood and Windsor. As a
result, I almost miss her when she slides shyly into the foyer of the
Ham Yard Hotel, a few minutes early, alone, and anonymous in
jeans and trainers. ‘Oh gosh, I’m not wearing any make-up,’ she
says, apologetically, when I introduce myself. ‘I thought I’d get
here in time to put some on!’
Perhaps it isn’t so surprising that I don’t recognise her at first.
Colman’s ability to embody different roles is unsurpassed, her
range extraordinary. Having made the nation howl with laughter
in Peep Show and Rev, she traumatised us with searing perfor-
mances in ITV’s drama Broadchurch and the 2011 film Tyrannosaur,
while the passive-aggressive stepmother she portrays in Fleabag
somehow causes you to inhabit both states – laughter and distress
- simultaneously. How does she do it?
‘The fierceness, the sadness, the darkness and despair that
emerge in her work seem to issue from some other source, and
make her gorgeous talent, whether it draws from real or imagined
pain, undeniable,’ declares Meryl Streep, her co-star in The Iron
Lady, when I email to ask. ‘I think she is one of our GREAT
actresses, I felt so lucky to have worked with her; and I can’t wait
to see where that antic, brave imagination takes us with the
Queen. Because it will be imagined, as there is no more private,
and hence mysterious, personage than Queen Elizabeth. But I am
sure Olivia will lead with her heart and be guided by her unerring
intuition and intelligence – and draw as accurate an essence as
can be divined.’
While Colman put on more than two stone to play Queen
Anne in The Favourite, the part for which she won her Academy
Award for Best Actress this year, her genius is less to be found
in imitating a character’s physicality and mannerisms than in
mining their inner emotions. ‘The joy of playing that part was I
got to be almost 15 people in one. Such extremes! That was
so much fun!’
By contrast, I expect that her new role playing our current
monarch, while highly anticipated by Streep and the rest of us,
may well be the toughest of her career.
‘I don’t really enjoy research,’ Colman admits, as we chat over
breakfast on the hotel’s roof terrace. ‘But for this, I have to accept
it. I can’t just sit like me, I have to sit like her, and look like pictures
of her. They have been teaching me how to walk – I’m really
terrible at that, I have no physical awareness. I walk a bit like
a farmer, one of the directors said.’
The voice was another challenge. ‘I thought that general
“posh” would do it, but apparently not. Really unusual vowel
sounds,’ she says. Like what? ‘Well, it’s not quite this, but if you’re
saying “yes”, you say “ears”.’ She bursts out laughing. ‘It’s fun to do,
isn’t it? Very hard to stop. Ears.’
Still harder for her, I would imagine, was perfecting the Queen’s
all-but-unshakeable imperturbability, so beautifully embodied
by Claire Foy, that offers barely a hint at the passions that may
be raging beneath. Colman, by contrast, seems to be lacking
a protective layer of skin that has been granted to the rest of us. It
is what makes her so compelling to watch on screen – you can
see the emotions chase each other in succession across her
mobile features – but can she play blank? ‘Claire was so brilliant
at it that for the first few months, I just thought, “What would
she do?” and I did that,’ agrees Colman, humbly. ‘I’m not very
good at not moving my face.
‘There’s one episode where they tell the story of Aberfan –
which, shamefully, I didn’t know – and it was so awful, tragic and
harrowing, and I really struggled with it.’ (In 1966, a colliery spoil
tip slid down a mountain onto a primary school in the Welsh
village of Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Famously,
this appalling tragedy elicited one of the Queen’s rare public mis-
steps, when she refused to visit for eight days, giving rise to public
criticism. In 2002, she admitted that this was her ‘biggest regret’.)
‘So they gave me an earpiece and put on the Shipping Forecast
and I just listened to that and pretended that was all that was
going on,’ says Colman. Even so, watching the episode in ques-
tion, I could clearly see her eyes welling up.
Colman’s middle-period Queen has fewer of the grand set-
pieces of Foy’s reign – much of the drama and glamour goes to
O
sca r-w inning ac tresses, li ke roya lt y, nor ma lly require a cer ta in
protocol. There will be the entourage to manage, the
punishing schedu le to work a round a nd a long wa it
