After 60 Episodes, Peter Morgan Says Goodbye to
‘The Crown’
Morgan’s
opulent Netflix show about the British royal family set new standards for
prestige TV. With the final season ending, he’s amazed he’s pulled it off.
“I am really
surprised that I’ve sustained it,” Peter Morgan said of creating “The Crown”
over the last decade.
By Roslyn Sulcas
Reporting
from London
Published
Dec. 12, 2023
Updated
Dec. 13, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/arts/television/the-crown-peter-morgan.html?searchResultPosition=
Half an hour later, he flopped into a chair,
running his hands through his hair. As both the show’s writer and showrunner,
he was already working on Season 2 while keeping an eye on every detail of
Season 1. “I love doing this, but it’s overwhelming to a degree that isn’t
sustainable over a long time,” he said.
“This” was the “The Crown,” Morgan’s ambitious
six-part series that would span most of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II,
exploring national and international politics, personalities and social change
through the prism of an intergenerational — and royal — family. After 60
episodes, all written or co-written by Morgan, he has seen it through.
On Thursday, Netflix will release the last six
episodes of the sixth season, marking the end of a show that has been one of
the most watched, argued over and influential creations in recent television
history.
Reminded, in a recent interview, of those
early doubts, Morgan, 60, nodded emphatically. “I am really surprised that I’ve
sustained it,” he said. “I do feel” — he paused for a while — “astonished, and
grateful, and quite emotional that we got to the end.”
Morgan, center, with Matt Smith (who played
Prince Philip for the first two seasons) and Claire Foy (who played Queen
Elizabeth in the same period) during filming of “The Crown.”Credit...Alex
Bailey/Netflix
When Morgan, along with the director Stephen
Daldry and the producer Andy Harries, first pitched “The Crown” to broadcasters
in 2014, it was with “low expectations,” Daldry wrote in an email. Netflix was
only just beginning to create original content, and streaming was in its
infancy.
The BBC would have been a natural home for
“The Crown,” but “Peter wanted to do something pioneering and different,” said
Suzanne Mackie, who has been an executive producer on the show from the start.
“I remember feeling that the TV landscape was going to change and we were going
to be part of it.”
“The Crown” was not just part of a shifting
landscape, but an agent of change. The show’s blend of scrupulously researched
fact and dramatic fiction, its cinematic production values and the changing of
its principal cast every two seasons, all set new parameters for prestige
long-form television.
“What an extraordinary thing to have invented:
the story of a family using three different sets of actors. I don’t think it’s
ever been done before,” said Imelda Staunton, who played Queen Elizabeth over
the last two seasons.
The final season, which opens in 1997 with the
run-up to the death of Diana, has been the hardest of all for Morgan to create,
he said, not just because the events and images feel familiar to much of the
audience. He also covered some of the same terrain period in his 2006 film,
“The Queen,” which focused on the queen (played by Helen Mirren) confronting
the emotional public response to the death of Princess Diana.
“I’ve been dreading this moment,” he said
frankly. “How do I repeat myself without repeating myself?” He decided that if
he couldn’t find a convincing Diana, he would tell the story of the end of her
life through Dodi Fayed, Diana’s boyfriend who died with her in the crash, and
his mourning father, the Egyptian billionaire Mohamed al-Fayed, who yearned for
acceptance from the royals and died this year.
“But once we had Elizabeth Debicki as Diana, I
could enjoy writing her, the life she had, the mischief,” and her extraordinary
ability to connect with people, Morgan said.
The queen’s death last year, and watching her
funeral, also shifted Morgan’s approach to the final season, he said, which
ends in 2005 with the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles.
Elizabeth’s story now concludes with the monarch celebrating and coming to
terms with that union, but also contemplating her own death and legacy.
“What about the life I put aside, the woman I
put aside, when I became queen?” the monarch asks herself, in a rare moment of
vulnerability.
Daldry, who directed the final episode, said
that in filming it, Staunton “went on an amazing journey with me in reflecting
the queen’s mortality and reign.” For Staunton, “it was an extraordinary thing
to try to inhabit a person who was completely dutiful all her life,” she said.
“You will never see that again.”
By the end of the show, the queen, Morgan
said, “is wrestling with the illogicality of the system” that required such
duty of her. “It’s like religion,” he added. “Why lead such a powerful
institution along irrational lines? But then maybe the irrationality is the
romance. I’ve got no closer to an answer.”
Morgan, 60, grew up in London, the son of two
refugees: his Jewish father had fled Nazi Germany; his Catholic mother escaped
communist Poland. “If I weren’t the son of immigrants, I wouldn’t have dared
write about the British royal family,” he said. “You have to have to feel one
foot outside, one foot inside, to understand it.”
While studying fine art at Leeds University,
he decided he wanted to work in theater and came to writing “through a series
of accidents.” Now, he said, he can’t imagine doing anything else.
Morgan wrote television scripts for much of
the 1990s, before gaining wider attention in 2003 with “The Deal,” a film for
British television about the rivalry between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Then
came his 2006 breakthrough with “The Queen,” directed by Stephen Frears.
In 2013 he premiered “The Audience,” a play
about the weekly meetings between the queen, again played by Mirren, and her
prime ministers, which played in the West End and Broadway and won several Tony
Awards. Writing it, Morgan was struck by the relationship between the young
Elizabeth and the elderly Winston Churchill, and thought perhaps it could be a
film. As he began to explore the idea, and starting at an earlier point, “I
thought, there might be a TV show in this,” he recalled.
There was. In a negotiation between
on-the-record history and speculative imaginings characteristic of his work,
Morgan has portrayed the royal family as ordinarily human, with complicated and
rich inner lives. Private versus public, tradition versus modernity, relevance
versus mystery: “The Crown” has explored these issues over the decades of the
queen’s reign.
“The Crown” started “a seismic shift in royal
representation onstage and screen,” Mark Lawson wrote recently in The Guardian,
noting that before the series began, fictional representation of the royals was
mostly satirical or comedy. Morgan, by contrast, depicted “royalty with the
quasi-documentary realism of acting and lavish scenery,” Lawson added.
As a consequence, the series has come in for
opprobrium — particularly over the final two seasons — from outraged
royal-watchers, critics and public figures, who have called out historical
inaccuracies and objected to imagined conversations and encounters.
But truth is elusive, and ambiguity is
essential for Morgan. “I can only repeat what I have always said,” Morgan said.
“Some of it is necessarily fiction. But I try to make everything truthful even
if you can’t know if it’s accurate.” He quoted the late author Hilary Mantel:
“History is not the past, it’s the method we have evolved of organizing our
ignorance of the past.”
The royal family, Morgan said, “is like a
shadow family for everyone, which is why people have such strong opinions. And
it’s right and proper that a dramatist writes about kings and queens and
leaders. It has historically been what we do to make sense of the world.”
Over almost a decade, the show has made stars
of its young actors, among them Claire Foy, Vanessa Kirby and Emma Corrin. “It
changed my life,” Kirby, who played a young Princess Margaret, wrote in an
email. Morgan, she said, “understands how to paint arcs, deep emotional
journeys — no matter how big or small the part.” Morgan, she added, always
encourages “the unpredictable, the complex, the challenging.”
Khalid Abdalla, who plays Dodi, Diana’s
boyfriend, in Seasons 5 and 6, said that before taking the role, he had been
uninterested in watching a show about the royal family. But once he joined the
show, he said, he was “amazed by the way Peter gives a point of view you hadn’t
had, and makes you rethink what you thought you knew.”
When it came to the characters of Dodi and his
father, “it was moving that he gave the al-Fayeds a cultural space for their
grief,” Abdalla said. “There is a blindness to that side of the story that
needs to be called out and recognized, and Peter did that.”
For each season, Morgan spent at least six
months working with a core team to create a detailed timeline of the relevant
time period, with a research team providing documents, photographs and other
background materials for every scene. “I love playing with stories like a
jigsaw,” he said. “I am very specific and detail-oriented; if I were a doctor,
I would be an elbow man!”
That detail extends to every character. “Not
one character speaks in the same way,” Kirby said. “That is surprisingly rare
in writing — and so true to life.”
“I do feel” — Morgan paused for a while —
“astonished, and grateful, and quite emotional that we got to the
end.”Credit...Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times
Over the last ten years, Morgan has also,
together with the executive producers Mackie and Oona O’Beirn, overseen every
detail of the show’s production. “Making a show like this is like making ten
feature films each season, with the same care and detail,” Morgan said. “And
unlike one film, it just goes on.”
Now that he’s reached the end, “People keep
saying, you must be so happy and proud, but I’m not yet. I’m still a bit
traumatized.” He laughed. “I promise I will smoke a cigar soon.”
He is nonetheless on to his next project,
which he said he couldn’t talk about yet. “It won’t,” he said firmly,
“involve palaces.”
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