Variety’s Showrunners Sitdown: ‘The Crown’ Creator Peter Morgan on Almost Cutting Out Diana, Queen Elizabeth’s Death and Why His Next Project Will Have Guns
Even at its inception in 2014, Peter Morgan’s “The Crown” was designed to be one of the most ambitious television projects of all time — and by the time it concluded last year, his vision for the show had proven to be monumental. Created for Netflix, and premiering in 2016, Morgan’s series depicted the life of Queen Elizabeth II from right before she became the monarch through the year 2005, when then-Prince Charles married the love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles.
Its scope, in other words, was massive. The cast of “The Crown” rotated every two seasons, with Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton successively performing in the lead role, as the Queen faced a changing, roiled world — and a shrunken British empire. In more domestic matters, Elizabeth also had her own family both to love and contend with.
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Morgan discussed all of these things during an interview for Variety’s Showrunners Sitdown With Kate Aurthur presented by FX. We also talked about his fears about showing the lead-up to Diana’s death, how Queen Elizabeth’s death in 2022 changed the final season, getting the three Queens back for the series finale, what he didn’t include in the show — and why he’s taking a break from the Royal Family for now.
Going into the sixth and final season of “The Crown,” how long had you known where you wanted it to start, and how you wanted it to end?
I think we’d always known it would be exactly what it was. In fact, the only shock is that there were no deviations. I remember pitching it to Netflix in January of 2014. At the time, it might just still have been three seasons, but very quickly thereafter it became six. And it ended exactly where I imagined it would end.
Of course, there were a thousand deviations on the way. If you’d have told me beforehand what making six seasons of television of this kind would feel like, I might’ve changed the pitch in 2014. And I don’t think you’ll see many of these shows.
No!
I am very grateful for having been allowed to do it, and be sort of astonished that I survived it.
You’ve spoken about dreading telling the story of Diana’s death. What about it were you dreading the most?
Frankly, everything. I had a morbid fear of not being able to find an actress that was good enough to play her. So I think that my biggest worry was finding someone who just left you un-persuaded that she was Diana. I have to say that I was willing to rewrite the show, and not have Diana in it. And there were certain advantages to that — that she was this outside element, and we were with the family that was dealing with the outside element. I was prepared to do that if we hadn’t found the right actor — and first with Emma Corrin, and then with Elizabeth Debicki, I think we found the only two who could do it and in a way that really persuaded you.
Dealing with her death was obviously a matter of great sensitivity, but it’s also a matter of historical record. It’s a major historical event. And as a dramatist, I believe it’s your responsibility to tackle that stuff. But of course you do so knowing that there are a lot of people who have a lot of feelings around it, and are personally affected by it. So you have to be careful and sensitive and responsible in the way that you do it.
And the movie “The Queen” came out in 2006. What are the things you learned over the course of making “The Crown” that allowed you to tell the story of the aftermath of her death in such a different way?
Well, I didn’t want to repeat myself. “The Queen” was very much a story about the relationship between an elderly lady and a young modernizing prime minister, who’d come in and who could clearly see how the country needed to change. You almost saw it through Blair’s eyes as he thought, “God, how am I going to shake these people up?” And how painful is it, as an elderly lady, to realize that you might suddenly be misjudging the mood of the country?
With “The Crown,” even though it’s covering exactly the same period, I didn’t want to repeat myself. I didn’t want to do it through Blair’s eyes. I didn’t want to have those same conversations. A lot of that attitude I gave to Prince Charles at the time, now our king. And also I wanted to show, perhaps now that we were dramatizing Diana, I always wanted to see how she affected them in the aftermath of her death. So that’s why I wrote those scenes, which I thought really long and hard about — where Elizabeth Debicki was a figment of their imagination, part of their internal conversation.
How did you come up with that idea? And what did you want them to say to the people they were appearing to?
First of all, I thought really long and hard about it. It’s only two moments in the show, really, where we break with naturalism. And in the immediate aftermath of losing someone, I don’t think it’s uncommon for people to have imaginary conversations, to imagine seeing them. One or two people in the United Kingdom referred to it as a ghost. It’s not a ghost! There’s no rattling chains. It’s such a silly term, that — these are the imagined conversations of grieving people.
I find the scenes very moving, very touching. I think some of the best performances that Elizabeth Debicki gave us were in those scenes. She had incredible composure and incredible compassion.
“The Crown” is famously very well-researched. How does your research change as you close the distance from the past and present and move into things that are recent tabloid events, like Diana’s death?
Well, just because it’s recent doesn’t mean it’s not history. And there is of course a moment where you ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing…?” — that’s one of the reasons I like to keep so much time, as much as possible. A minimum of 10 years, is a personal rule. And in “The Crown” I managed to make it over 20 years. I believe that when you’re a generation away from the events of something, you have an opportunity to look at it with greater distance. And it is historical. I also believe that something that happened — I think the events in America on January the 6th, I think that’s a historical event. And anybody tackling contemporary American history would want to tackle something like that, and have a look at it from all sides. Diana’s death was every bit as momentous.
Are there reliable accounts on what happened between Diana and Dodi Fayed the night of her death? What were you relying on for that?
Well, we’ve got a number of witnesses. We’ve got sort of first-hand accounts from people. But then ultimately, there was a period of time where Diana and Dodi were on their own in that Ritz hotel room — we know everything that happened from the minute they left that hotel suite and went down to the car. We know yard by yard, second by second what happened. But what we don’t know is what they were saying to each other in that hotel room.
And that’s where I come in, and I have to use my imagination, but I don’t just sit there, and I don’t just start writing immediately thinking, “Well, I wonder what they had…” — you think really long and hard. Where is this particular character at this moment in their life? So many people both close to Diana and close to Dodi, have spoken about the frames of mind of the two individuals at the time, and you piece together what you imagine to be the case. And if you get it wrong, an audience will tell you. An audience, even without doing the research, will intuit if something is right or not. Audiences are so smart, and you can’t pull a fast one. If it’s implausible, an audience will know it instantly. They’ll just reject it.
So my harshest critic is not actually a historian, because historians are always pushing their own agenda. They’re often people with a certain point of view. I find an audience’s response much more telling, much more appropriate, because it comes from a huge cross-section of people with different political views, different ages. They reject if they’re being lied to. So we have to do a lot of work, and a lot of thinking.
And I call it joining the dots — where you know that this happened, you know that this happened. You sort of are reliably told that this person felt this, and this person felt this. But there still leaves this gap. And that’s the gap that a dramatist has to step into, and do their best. And I don’t know, it just so happens to be that I’m drawn to that gap-filling.
For many writers, it would be too restrictive. They want the wide-open planes of their imagination to be able to go in any direction they want with pure fiction. And for other people, they would want to do real second-by-second recreations of verbatim, where we know what was said, and they would want to recreate that. And I’m somewhere in the middle. For me, the fun is in the imagination. But imagination which is so well backed up with either anecdotal records, personal interviews you can do, historical books, that you can actually then imagine accurately.
That scene that night in the Ritz Hotel, I’m particularly proud of that scene, because I really believe that is as close as one can get to what Diana and Dodi were saying to each other that night. The fact that she didn’t want to, the fact that she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, the fact that she had no intention of marrying him. The fact that he was acting under the pressure of his father. There was a terrible tragedy at work there — and very moving. My conscience is pretty clear about where we got to with that.
How did you figure out how to map the rest of the season, going into what would be the end?
There was still seven or eight years left to cover. I always knew where I wanted to get to — I always knew it was going to be Charles marrying Camilla, and what that would provoke in his mother. And the kind of questions she would ask about whether she should or shouldn’t abdicate.
That’s basically like starting a whole season again, and thinking to yourself, “What are the key events that happened?” And these are the questions you would ask yourself every time. What are the events we can’t live without? What are the events in each personal character’s life? So, for example, we knew that Princess Margaret was going to die; we knew the queen mother was going to die. Suddenly you had this, “Oh my God!” It was really inconvenient for a dramatist. You’re like, “Well, you can’t have all those deaths in one — couldn’t they space them out?!” You’re given suddenly far too much story, far too quickly — and how do you manage that?
In my head, I always think of “The Crown” as a train, moving through history. Our train particularly moves at the same pace all the way through, which is a decade a season. So when things suddenly happen in bunch, you think, “Well, we might need three episodes to deal with one year,” the train, its rhythm, is messed up. The bulk of my time, I’d say 60% of my time as a showrunner was spent figuring out the season, mapping out the 10 episodes.
Once I started writing episodes, I would stick to it. But mapping out the outlines took me many months. And is always a process where I pitch it to the researchers, the researchers grant me permission or give me the red card. The architecture of it — thereafter, every decision is small. Once you’ve mapped out the architecture of the season, after that, everything else is like sure, until you get into the cutting room where things are minute. So you keep going down and down and down in terms of the size of your decisions.
Did Queen Elizabeth’s death in September 2022 change how you wrote the final season and the ending?
I think it changed everything. It changed how we felt making the show. We felt it much more acutely in the United Kingdom. It felt — I don’t know, it felt like a band without the lead singer, do you know what I mean? It felt like, “Oh, but we’re making a show about her, and about her life.” And then I had to suddenly deal with her death at a time where there was no prospect of her dying. So how do you then write an episode that deals with her death? Even though at that point she still had 18 years to live?
So that’s when we stumbled upon the fact that she was actively planning her funeral from 20 years out.
Oh, really?
Yeah. So that was a light bulb. I was like, “Well, we can make the final episode about her death, even though she’s not going to die for 18 years.” But in terms of the show, I don’t know, I think you suddenly thought, how much she as this rather unknowable woman… Suddenly the absence of her, even though she was never that present volubly in terms of speech, in terms of actions. She wasn’t like a Trump where you really feel them the whole time. Her absence, we felt it acutely.
William and Harry become bigger characters in the second half of the final season. And in the finale, the Harry uniform debacle — we see that happen. Were you forecasting what we now know are some themes in their relationship in terms of Harry’s resentment toward William? Harry calls him a company man at one point. How did you write that story?
I wrote it like I write anything else, where I’m reading what other people have said about it, and I’m figuring it out. The great thing about a show like “The Crown” — whether it’s the political characters, or the royal characters — I’m presenting it. I’m trying not to lead people too much by the nose, and people are reaching their own conclusions. And very often totally different conclusions about the same episode, the same character.
I wasn’t writing about today when I wrote about then. But the thing about families and history is you can write about then, and it suddenly have all sorts of relevance. And all it needs is for some events today to change, and suddenly what I’ve written about looks like it was prefigured.
That’s right.
And it wasn’t intentionally prefigured. You have to trust that if you write a long-running multi-generational family saga — which is, let’s face it, the most interesting thing you can write, by a mile — those stories will have echoes and connections with people. They bring their own family into it. It’s like looking at an abstract painting. You bring all sorts of meaning to that painting, your own story. And people do that with the royal family. You see it play out every single day in the British public, but also based on the appetite for what newspapers write, it seems the whole world uses this family as a sort of ersatz family onto which they project their own meanings. And that’s a long way around of saying, “I just wrote it the way I wrote it.” I wasn’t thinking, “Ha ha, I’ll make a point about today!”
Charles is very happy to marry the love of his life in the finale. He also simultaneously feels thwarted that his mother isn’t stepping down. Where did you want to leave him at the end of the series?
Exactly as you’ve just described it. As I listened to you ask the question, I thought, “I like the sound of that.” I like the sound of two things being possible at once, and both of them being strongly held positions.
Of course, on the one hand, she was never going to stand down! Those are the rules. But on the other hand, as a mother, how can she not want to? Because the act of staying on, involves her becoming a bad mother — a good queen! But a bad mother. Because she’s denying her eldest son the fulfillment of his lifelong preparation. And knowing that if she stays on the throne for the same amount of time that her mother stays alive, you’re going to end up with Charles being exactly as he is today — a vulnerable man, not in the best of health and no longer in the prime of his life. And what a shame for him, on the one hand, that he hasn’t been able to have his own reign, being able to have as much influence. He’s a deeply interesting man and a very committed, responsible king. But he’s now, unfortunately, struggling with other things and other challenges that come with age.
Elizabeth has an internal debate about whether to step down, as illustrated by Claire Foy and Olivia Colman playing advocates for one side and the other. Was it always the plan to have the two of them come back for the finale?
There’s always the chance that the actors would be unavailable or the actors wouldn’t want to come back. So I think before I floated the idea to anyone, I seemed to remember making contact with Claire and saying, “If I were to write one scene — just one scene — would you?” And she said, “Yeah.” And I knew that Claire, if I’d have said, I’m going to write a whole episode, she’d have said, “No.” I knew I had one shot, and it would be one scene. And I think it was the same with Olivia. Because I think when actors move on, they want to move on. I understand that.
I think it was their respect for Imelda Staunton, rather than their gratitude to the show, that brought them back. And I was thrilled. I suddenly thought, “Good, I’ve got one scene with both of them.”
It was in 2014 that “The Crown” was originally announced. And that it would unfold over 60 episodes — one of, if not the most ambitious television projects ever to be planned. What do you remember about going in?
I had no sense of what I’d taken on. Because I think if you do know, you wouldn’t do it. I think you stumble in like an innocent fool, and you thought, “Oh, well, that sounds like fun!” And you assemble a nice group of people, and you think, “Oh, this is nice.” I’m speaking now, just as a freelancer, there’s something unsettling if you’re a writer or a director or an actor, always looking for the next job, or meeting different people or wondering if it works out here, works out there. And a lot of us as artists are unsettled, complicated people from complicated backgrounds with complicated lives.
So the idea of finding stability and a family — there’s an extraordinarily high percentage of people that made “The Crown” that stayed from Episode 1 to Episode 10 of Season 6. It was such a functional, gorgeous group of human beings. It sort of removes the noise and the nonsense of freelance life, where you’re worried about this, worried about that. “This new person in that job, that new person — do I know them? Will they develop a relationship with them?” We were spared all of that, all that existential crackle, and we’re able to just do our jobs. Because the freelance life, the self-employed life, there can be a cold, whistling wind of discomfort. And I think we were all enormously privileged at a very special time for television to have had that opportunity.
So when it got very tough, and it always gets tough — a show like this is impossibly tough to do. I’m just talking about how to make it good, rather than personal relationships. I kept pinching myself and reminding myself of what I felt might be a unique moment. And indeed, the climate has changed. Now, I don’t know that the same show would get made again. We were left alone to do it — left alone! I mean, I can’t stress this enough. We were given support, and no notes. This is the show we wanted to make, and it is the way it is because that was how we wanted to make it. I mean, when do you get that?! I mean, I kept thinking, on behalf of all the other people who haven’t been given this opportunity, I’ve got to not screw it up. I’ve got to not drop the ball.
With the new actors coming in, when they’d switch out roles, what did you find were the best ways to talk to them about the continuity of the character and what you wanted them to bring to the character that was new?
Well, I mean, just because they were playing the same characters didn’t mean you approached them in the same way. Because every actor — so for example — the way in which you would deal with Claire Foy was very different from the way you deal with Olivia Colman, was very different from the way you deal with Imelda Staunton. That said, there’s something about the character of the Queen that filtered into all of them. And they all became extraordinarily stoic, resilient. Something filters through from the character into who you are. But with a whole new cast, come whole new people, whole new human beings. They have different methods and approaches. So the way Gillian Anderson works could not be more different from the way that Olivia Colman works.
And so Gillian likes a lot of preparation, a lot of support, a lot of research, a lot of engagement, a lot of stimulation. I get the sense that Olivia reads the scene in the taxi on the way there and forgets it in the taxi on the way home. And if you say to her, “Do you remember the scene we filmed yesterday?” She’ll go, “Remind me,” and you go, “Olivia! It was yesterday!” And she goes, “I know, but…”
Wow!
So you’re like, “Wow!” Exactly. So you have to have a production that can cope with both. And cope with anything! Because actors have different processes, and you want to support all those different processes no matter what those processes are, to get the best work.
Are there any royal stories that you wish you could have portrayed? Like Andrew and Fergie, or the attempt to kidnap Princess Anne?
So the attempt to kidnap Princess Anne sounds riveting. And you think, “My God, what a fantastic story. I can’t wait to see that! Why didn’t they put it in ‘The Crown’? I want my money back.” We looked into it, and it’s actually not that interesting. Sort of nothing happens. It was a sort of, “Eh.” And I didn’t want to try and cook it into something that it wasn’t.
Andrew and Fergie — I am afraid I need to feel something. They were just characters I didn’t want to write. And also, I felt that given that they were never going to wear the crown, the skewer and the shish kebab, as it were, of the show, is the relationship between Buckingham Palace and Downing Street.
And when you deviate from that too much, you deviate from the two houses. You deviate from the queen, the prime minister, and that intimate audience that they have together about what’s going on in the world and in the country. The show quickly becomes something that it shouldn’t become. So we did try deviations and always learned the lesson if you stay clear of the line of succession, you’re lost. So as long as it involved the prime minister, and as long as it involved the queen, you were always on what I would call core “Crown.”
As a writer, have you always been interested in writing about historical figures?
No. That came to me when I was about 40, so I’ve only been doing it about 20 years. I mention it to my own children, always, somebody said it to me, which is that, “The best creative years of your life are 40 to 60.” That doesn’t mean it applies to everybody, but it certainly applied to me, and I was told it before I got to 40. Stephen Frears told me that, he said that “Your best years are 40 to 60.”
I’m now 61! It’s all over.
You seem like you’re doing great.
Well, you’re very kind. But I’m 61. It’s finished. It’s over.
Is your next project adapting your play “Patriots?”
No. My next project is an adaptation of “Boys from Brazil.”
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Wow. That movie scared me so much!
That’s a really good reaction. I like that reaction.
The blue eyes.
Don’t give away the plot!
Sorry!
There’s a generation of people who don’t know what happens.
You’ve said you have a prequel idea to “The Crown,” which would go backwards in time. Has that —
Well, it would start further back, and then move forward in time.
Yes, no, sorry!
It wouldn’t be “Benjamin Button: The Crown.”
It would be linear, but it would be in the past! Has there been any forward movement on that?
Nothing yet. Because I am enjoying my time outside the Palace gates, and I’m excited to do these other stories. But if I don’t become too decrepit at some point, I might like to do that because the story is sensational.
You have a specific idea?
I do.
Spill it.
No!
OK. There’s always so much drama with the royal family —
“Spill it.”
Spill it! Even recently with Kate Middleton announcing she has cancer.
Yeah, I wouldn’t go anywhere near that.
Right. But do you watch it as a spectator? Like, “Thank God! Phew.”
I don’t!
No #whereisKate hashtag for you?
I hope the British press behaves well. And I hope we behave well, because actually the press responds in many cases to our greed. And I just hope we all collectively, whether it’s us or the press, behaves well. These people need privacy sometimes.
From watching it in the U.S., it just seemed like the British media at a certain point — not just the tabloids — but the media became more and more outraged about things in “The Crown.” Did that make the show harder to make?
There’s an unfortunate climate of outrage about everything. I try and understand it. I don’t see it in American newspapers. I don’t see it in French, in Austrian — wherever I travel, I don’t see the same degree of what I would describe as outrage. There is an outrage response to everything in the U.K., and I think it’s deeply troubling. Reviews for any movie are either one star or five stars! That doesn’t reflect. Everything is dialed up. And I can only imagine it’s because journalists are under pressure to keep their jobs. Their jobs are being measured by clicks. If you get a certain amount of response to what it is that you write, you will get — I’m appalled when I read English newspapers, no matter what the subject is, how much outrage and how much judgment.
We got caught up in some of that; but everybody gets caught up in that. No matter what. If you’re doing something that has high visibility about a subject that is as discussed and turned over as the royal family, you are walking into an area where there will be people expressing opinions and trying to make money from it. That’s what, there’s a lot of royal correspondents, there’s a lot of historians, there’s a lot of people who have agendas. But I want to say it’s about sport, it’s about politics, it’s about culture. There’s rage. There’s a lot of outrage.
What’s something you still want to do as a creator?
Oh, there’s a lot I want to do. Right now, I really want to write some men again. For me, “The Crown,” even though there are male characters in it, it feels like a female show. I’ve always felt I was writing a feminine show — where the protagonist was female, and everything radiated out of that. I think I want to write a couple of things now which feel masculine. I feel like re-engaging with that. But one of the reasons why I hold on to the opportunity of still going back to “The Crown” is because of a complex female character at the heart of things, and I enjoyed that.
But for now, I’d like to do something where people aren’t polite, aren’t upper-class British, and they have guns. I want some guns. Yesterday, I met a couple of fellow showrunners who were talking about scenes where they were talking about disposing a body. And how did they deal with it, dramaturgically? I was so envious. I want that problem! I want a problem of how to deal with a body.
Will there be bodies in “The Boys From Brazil”?
Yes! A lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There’s a really excessive amount of death. Oh yeah. Oh, no. I’m making sure of that.
Fantastic.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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