The cast of The Crown has admitted that they are worried about how the British royal family feels about the Netflix series, but do they tune in? Prince Harry, Princess Eugenie and more members of the late Queen Elizabeth II’s family have revealed their thoughts about the scripted drama loosely based on royals over the years.
Season 1 of The Crown started streaming on Netflix in 2016 and starred Claire Foy as the queen and Matt Smith as the late Prince Philip.
“I would hate the idea of her watching it,” Foy told Town & Country in 2017 about the monarch tuning in to the drama. “When you’re playing a real person, you never want to be ghoulish. I don’t want to pick apart a person. I want to invent someone. So, I would hate for her to watch it and think I overdramatized anything.”
Vanessa Kirby, who played Princess Margaret on the show’s first two seasons, claimed a friend of hers overheard Eugenie talking about the show at a party in 2017.
”A friend of mine was at a party and didn’t know anyone, so he sidled up to this group who were talking about The Crown,” Kirby told Harper’s Bazaar. “One girl said, ‘Well, my granny watches it and really likes it.’ It slowly dawned on him that the girl was Eugenie and her granny was the queen.”
While the queen herself hasn’t publicly spoken about The Crown, U.K. government’s Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, pleaded with the streaming service to add a “disclaimer” to the series in 2020. Netflix, however, disagreed.
“We have always presented The Crown as a drama — and we have every confidence our members understand it’s a work of fiction that’s broadly based on historical events,” the streaming service said in a statement. “As a result, we have no plans, and see no need, to add a disclaimer.”
Dowden’s request came after season 4 of The Crown was released and debuted the character of the late Princess Diana, played by Emma Corrin. While the Netflix series has already been renewed for seasons 5 and 6, Harry and Meghan Markle’s royal exit drama will not be covered on the show.
“To be clear, series 6 will not bring us any closer to present-day — it will simply enable us to cover the same period in greater detail,” creator Peter Morgan said in a statement in July 2020.
Scroll through for everything the royal family — including Harry — has said about the Netflix series: