31 "The Crown" Season 4 Behind-The-Scenes Facts You Probably Didn't Know, But Should
The cast has a massive group chat where they send voice messages back and forth.
🚨Obviously spoilers ahead for The Crown Season 4!🚨
2. Season 4 was filmed out of order, so there was a point when the cast was filming Episodes 9 and 10 and Episode 3 at the same time — Emma Corrin said it was wild having to play Diana when she was 19 and 28 at the same time.
Emma elaborated, saying, "I really enjoyed that because it made me have to appreciate and have to understand exactly where she'd come from and exactly where she was going."
3. The cast from Season 4 has a massive WhatsApp group text and they text each other all the time — Josh O'Connor and Emma said they also send "voice notes" and it's fun listening to Olivia Colman and Gillian Anderson get excited when they successfully send one.
Emma and Josh both agreed that Gillian is the most "active" in the WhatsApp group and Tobias Menzies "ignores everything" and then will suddenly text, "Hi, guys."
4. At the first table read for Season 4, Gillian was actually listening to Margaret Thatcher speaking in her headphones so she could get the accent down.
5. In fact, no one, except for The Crown's vocal coach, had heard Gillian's Margaret Thatcher voice until the second day of rehearsals — Gillian said she was "quite shy" to unveil it for the first time.
Gillian and creator Peter Morgan are a couple IRL, and he hadn't even heard the Margaret Thatcher voice until he begged her to unleash it at the rehearsal.
6. Olivia said it was "very difficult to keep a straight face" while acting opposite Gillian as Margaret Thatcher — Olivia couldn't stop laughing over Gillian's Thatcher voice during their scenes together.
7. When The Crown was casting the role of Camilla Parker Bowles, they actually hired Emma to come in and just read for Diana off camera.
8. The word Emma used to "get into" Diana's accent was "alright," and she would say it over and over again in order to practice the inflection of Diana's voice.
10. Gillian also worked with the movement coach before filming began and learned how to mimic Margaret Thatcher's unique walk.
Gillian said, "I worked with a movement coach as to where her weight was carried, the fact that she put most of her weight on the front of her feet. Her left foot is always slightly pigeon-toed. She swings her left arm, kind of pumps herself through the room. Those are things that if you want to play Margaret Thatcher, you don’t want to miss."
11. Olivia said everyone was really "freaked out" when they saw Emma in her Diana wig for the first time because she looked so much like her.
12. And Emma explained that the Diana wig was originally just a very long wig that the hair department then had to cut and style to match Diana's hair.
13. Princess Diana's wedding dress took 14 weeks to make and included several "long" fittings for Emma. The dress is shown for less than a minute on screen.
14. Costume designer Amy Roberts got permission from Princess Diana's original wedding dress designers, David and Elizabeth Emanuel, to reproduce the dress.
15. In fact, David helped consult on fabric choices for the costume and even brought in copies of the original designs.
David also encouraged Amy and The Crown's design team to make the dress their own too. Amy elaborated, saying, "He said, 'Just do it.' He wasn’t precious about it or neurotic about it. That released us from any fear. We just went for the feel of it, the look of it, the size of it. Big sleeves, big frills. We didn’t get too stressed. Maybe there’s 201 pearls and we’ve only done 200."
16. In the end, it took about 10 people to get Emma into Princess Diana's wedding dress for filming, and it was an extremely heavy costume.
17. Olivia and Emma both agree that Helena Bonham Carter was "the worst DJ" when they would play music in the makeup van together — Emma said it ranged from "obscure clarinet solos" to the Mulan soundtrack.
Olivia hilariously said they would all sit in a row and text each other, "What the fuck is this?" whenever Helena started playing music.
18. The cast stayed in cabins close together in Aviemore, Scotland while filming "The Balmoral Test" — Olivia hates being alone, so she actually roomed with Marion Bailey, who played the Queen Mother.
Also while in Scotland, Olivia hilariously convinced everyone to watch Naked Attraction together.
19. During the big family scenes, the cast would play "Fives" between takes and would play "for hours on end."
You can watch Emma and Olivia demonstrate how to play here.
20. Also, sometimes during the big family scenes, the crew would simply let the cameras run and the cast would just have fun together while playing games and playing with the dogs.
21. While rehearsing the scene when Camilla and Diana go to lunch together, Benjamin Caron had Josh sit between Emerald Fennell and Emma so they could really play up the tension.
Ben explained that one of the rehearsals involved an exercise where only one of them could put their hand on Josh's and Emerald as Camilla did it first and kept it there throughout the scene. Emma said, "It kind of brought to our attention the fact that, regardless if Josh was physically there, we [Camilla and Diana] were battling it out over him [Charles]."
22. The Crown Season 4 had only six more days of filming when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything down — they had to still film the avalanche, so they ended up using actual news footage and showing Charles reflecting on the accident.
23. While filming, Emma notoriously got really giggly and started laughing after six o'clock and everyone would know it was the end of the day.
Josh hilariously said, "Sometimes she would just have this random spirt of madness and it might not be six o'clock, and we could just say, 'It's six o'clock somewhere.'"
24. Originally, Gillian was going to wear prosthetic teeth to match Margaret Thatcher's, but they didn't look natural on camera, so Gillian learned how to hold her mouth so she had an overbite.
25. Gillian was most nervous to film the scenes in "48:1" when Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II clash over apartheid — she said, "Those were the scenes I was most looking forward to and most dreading at the same time."
She also said that those scenes were some of the hardest because they involved long consecutive filming days, and so many years were depicted.
26. While the song was changed in the final version of the episode, Emma was actually dancing to Cher's "Do You Believe" — there was no choreography and she just came up with the moves in the moment.
They ended up having to film the scene twice because Emma was mouthing the lyrics to "Do You Believe," but they didn't have the rights to the song and knew it would have to change.
27. In the episode "Terra Nullius" when Prince Charles and Princess Diana toured Australia in 1983, costume designer Amy Roberts created 17 Diana looks for just that one episode.
In real life, Diana reportedly brought nearly 200 outfits for the tour.
29. Emma was hospitalized after filming the moment when Princess Diana is playing in the pool with young William and Harry.
Emma explained, "I'm asthmatic and I had been ill for a while with a bad cough. We were meant to be flying back that night to the UK [from filming in Spain], so we went past a hospital to get me antibiotics. The doctors gave me an oxygen test and said, 'We cannot let you go because your oxygen levels are so low,' so I was hospitalized."
30. Since Season 3, Josh had his eye on a paper weight with Prince Charles' head on it and he wanted to steal it when he wrapped Season 4 — unfortunately, he never got the chance because production finished early due to the pandemic.
He even had a whole plan to steal it, and still hopes he can get his hands on it.
31. And finally, Emma took home one of Diana's necklaces from set — it's a gold chain that she actually wears quite a lot.
Emma said, "So the scene we were doing was in Diana’s room or something, and there was just like loads of jewelry in a jewelry box and there was a gold chain. So I stole the gold chain, which I wear."