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Paul Bettany and Claire Foy to Headline A Very English Scandal Season 2

Thursday, Mar 11, 2021
Paul Bettany and Claire Foy to Headline A Very English Scandal Season 2

Paul Bettany and Claire Foy are about to become embroiled in quite the scandal.

The Wandavision and The Crown stars have signed on to A Very British Scandal, BBC One and Amazon Prime’s follow-up to A Very English Scandal, TVLine has learned.

Foy and Bettany will portray the Duchess and Duke of Argyll, aka the key players in one of Britain’s most salacious divorce cases of the 20th century. Per the official logline:

Famed for her charisma, beauty and style, Margaret (Foy), Duchess of Argyll, dominated the front pages as a divorcee featuring accusations of forgery, theft, violence, drug-taking, secret recording, bribery and an explicit Polaroid picture all played out in the white-hot glare of the 1960s media.

Sarah Phelps (Dublin Murders) wrote the series, which will unfold in three 60-minute episodes and which will investigate the role institutional misogyny played in how the duchess was shamed in society and vilified by the press and the judicial system.

“I’m so excited to work with [director] Anne [Sewitsky], Sarah and Paul on this extraordinary project,” Foy said via statement, “and to explore through this story how often shame, judgment and controversy surrounds a woman’s sexuality.”

Foy, Phelps and Sewitsky are among the series’ executive producers. A Very British Scandal will be available on Amazon Prime Video in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and on BBC One and BBC iPlayer in the United Kingdom.

The series’ predecessor, A Very English Scandal, starred Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw and chronicled the events leading up to England’s Jeremy Thorpe imbroglio.

‘I’ve threatened to break the rules and kiss her’: Claire Foy and Matt Smith on acting in lockdown

Tuesday, Jun 30, 2020
‘I’ve threatened to break the rules and kiss her’: Claire Foy and Matt Smith on acting in lockdown

They’re separated by a two-metre stick but their chemistry is as strong as ever. The Crown stars on their socially-distanced take on Lungs; lockdown diets and naked drawings.

Claire Foy and Matt Smith are describing the odd experience of rehearsing a play while a stage manager holds a two-metre stick between them. The pair are preparing for a second run of Lungs, an intimate two-hander about the travails of modern coupledom that was first staged last year at the Old Vic in London. Their characters fought, made up and slept together on stage. This time, however, they won’t even be able to get within hand-holding distance of each other.

The stick is there to ensure that physical distance remains at all times in accordance with lockdown rules, Foy explains, adding that the stage manager, Maria Gibbons, beats them apart with it. Smith reminds her that the guidance for distancing has “just been reduced to one metre, so snap her stick in half!”

The two actors have a Tigger-ish enthusiasm in their conversational to-and-fro, even on a Zoom call at the end of a day of rehearsals. They first met six years ago on the set of Netflix hit The Crown. Foy had already got the part of young Elizabeth II and was in the room when Smith came in for his screen test. “She was very generous,” he says, “and there was something that worked about it.” They proved to have a remarkable chemistry and it is clear from their exuberant banter now that they spark just as well off-camera. They joke, tease and even finish each other’s sentences.

“We’re friends,” says Foy, “and after The Crown we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we did something together again?’ I didn’t know if anyone would let us and then we independently read this play and went, ‘Shall we just do it?’”

Lungs centres on a well-meaning, if smug, middle-class couple who talk about saving the planet and debate whether to have a baby or not. This production, performed in the theatre’s empty auditorium and filmed on Zoom, is live-streaming to audiences, to raise money for the Old Vic, which has been dark for over three-months and is in a precarious financial situation. This is the first in a new series of shows from the theatre, made to earn some income in lockdown. Matthew Warchus, the theatre’s artistic director and this show’s director, is also a seasoned film-maker, Foy points out, so he is doing some “very, very clever things into camera”.

Continue reading ‘I’ve threatened to break the rules and kiss her’: Claire Foy and Matt Smith on acting in lockdown

Claire Foy looks back on her reign as Queen Elizabeth II

Monday, Dec 11, 2017
Claire Foy looks back on her reign as Queen Elizabeth II

By: Shirley Li

Claire Foy made Peter Morgan’s job easy. As Queen Elizabeth II on The Crown, the 33-year-old actress delivered a Golden Globe-winning performance the show’s creator says he depended on throughout the first two seasons of the Netflix period drama. “I don’t have to give her fireworks to make her feel like she’s the epicenter of everything,” he explains. “With Claire, you could push her in any direction. Her comic timing is good, her sense of tragedy is good…. No matter what we gave her to do, she would be able to do it, so that gave me enormous freedom as a writer.”

Though Foy departs the show along with the rest of its principal cast after season 2, she’s already scored her next role, as troubled hacker Lisbeth Salander in the Dragon Tattoo sequel The Girl in the Spider’s Web (slated for 2018). Here, she talks the end of her small-screen sovereignty. (Spoilers for The Crown season 2 ahead!)

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What was it like saying goodbye to Elizabeth during your final scene?
CLAIRE FOY: It was surreal. It’s very difficult to prepare yourself for that moment. Ultimately what you end up feeling is just sort of confused and that you need to go home and have a lie-down, really.

Season 2 delves deeper into examining Elizabeth’s restraint, even while those around her fail her. What was the key to tapping into that?
I think the moments when Elizabeth really becomes angry is when she’s lied to. She’s been very disappointed by the men in her life for their lack of endurance. She feels left out, and what makes her angry more than anything else in the world is the sense that people aren’t trying their best.
Continue reading Claire Foy looks back on her reign as Queen Elizabeth II

Interview with The Crown’s Claire Foy

Wednesday, Nov 29, 2017
Interview with The Crown’s Claire Foy

By: Alexandra Pollard

Losing out on a Bafta for the second year in a row was, Claire Foy insists, one of the best moments of her career. She was up for best actress for her role as Elizabeth II in The Crown, and was widely expected to win – but the moment came, and it went to Happy Valley’s Sarah Lancashire instead. “Can I just say,” said Lancashire from the podium, “Claire Foy, you have given me the best 10 hours under a duvet that I’ve ever had.” For Foy, it was better than winning.

“That was, I’m telling you, one of the most ridiculous moments of my life,” she says, beaming. “I mean, I love her. I grew up watching her.” Foy is sitting opposite me, wearing a comfy-looking jumpsuit and scuffed Converse, her hair – now she no longer needs to adopt the Queen’s bouffant do – newly cropped short. “There’s nothing as amazing as a fellow actor saying you’re good.”

We meet a couple of days before Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announce their engagement, a relationship Foy has expressed approval of in the past (“I must speak for actresses,” she said, “We’re not a bad bunch. We’re all right”). She’d had nearly a decade of television roles – she first appeared on screen as a werewolf’s ex-fiancee in Being Human, then later starred in BBC dramas The Night Watch and Wolf Hall – but it was not until The Crown that, she says, people’s perception of her changed. The lavish Netflix series had an unprecedented £100m budget, but the show’s heart and soul was Foy’s compelling, devastating restraint as the young monarch. It is no easy task to play a woman whose main personality traits are, by necessity, detachment and composure, but with just the downward crease of a smile or the flicker of her enormous eyes, Foy hinted at the tumult rippling beneath the Queen’s steady surface.

There has been speculation over whether the royal family have seen The Crown – Foy finds it easier to imagine that they haven’t – but if they do gather round Netflix for season two, it might make for awkward viewing. Beginning in 1956, with the Suez crisis escalating and the British public starting to question the monarchy’s relevance, the season (which is Foy’s last; Olivia Colman will take up the mantle for the Queen’s later years) explores the parts of the royal story we are unlikely to see on a commemorative plate any time soon. We learn of the Nazi affiliations of Edward VIII, the sexual proclivities of Princess Margaret’s disdainful fiance Antony Armstrong-Jones, and – perhaps most shockingly – Prince Philip’s supposed infidelity.
Continue reading Interview with The Crown’s Claire Foy

Claire Foy on the Second Season of ‘The Crown’, Going Blonde & Early Bedtimes

Tuesday, Nov 14, 2017
Claire Foy on the Second Season of ‘The Crown’, Going Blonde & Early Bedtimes

By: Lisa Armstrong

What happens to an actress once she has played the queen? Does some magisterial DNA rub off on her? Helen Mirren, Kristin Scott Thomas, Judi Dench have all been appointed dames. Only Cate Blanchett, who so magnificently illuminated Elizabeth II’s namesake, Elizabeth I, is yet to receive a title. But since she’s an Aussie and thus, technically, a subject of Her Majesty, there’s still a chance. Besides, Blanchett exudes innate queenliness.

“The role can give you quite a lot back if you let it,” says Peter Morgan, who should know, since he wrote not only The Crown (for TV) and The Audience (for the stage) but also The Queen, the 2006 movie that arguably restored the monarchy’s popularity following Princess Diana’s death. “When Helen was a guest of the Obamas at the White House Correspondents’ dinner,” says Morgan, “everyone else was being mercilessly teased, but the entire room stood up and cheered her. I’m not sure Helen didn’t grow two inches.”

The glow of imminent stardom flickers like Saturn’s rings around Claire Foy, who will be back as Elizabeth Regina in season two of The Crown next month. Directors from Steven Soderbergh and La La Land’s Damien Chazelle to Evil Dead’s Fede Alvarez have lined up to work with the prolific but previously little-known 33-year-old British actress. Far from being in character when we meet for chamomile tea at the chic London members’ club Quo Vadis, she is wearing tortoiseshell glasses, her blondish hair scraped back with visible roots—the remnants of her role in her recent movie Breathe, opposite Andrew Garfield—and a denim jumpsuit from Citizens of Humanity. (There’s no such thing as a bad jumpsuit day in Foy’s book; at the Emmys in September, she arrived in a silver-trimmed black version by Oscar de la Renta.) By the time you read this, she and her jumpsuits will have decamped to Atlanta to film Chazelle’s First Man, which traces America’s determination to get its man on the moon before the Soviets. Foy plays Neil Armstrong’s wife, Janet, opposite Ryan Gosling.
Continue reading Claire Foy on the Second Season of ‘The Crown’, Going Blonde & Early Bedtimes

The Queen of the Small Screen Goes Big

Monday, Oct 23, 2017
The Queen of the Small Screen Goes Big

By: Anne Marie Scanlon

From Tesco to the Tower and after two coronations, actress Claire Foy has never lost her head

As someone who studied history to post-graduate level, reads history books for fun and gobbles up historical fiction, I was beside myself with excitement when I heard the BBC was dramatising Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the Man Booker Award winner 2009.

Transferring beloved books onto both the big screen and the small is a notoriously tricky task but director Peter Kosminsky’s adaptation was a unanimous hit.

The casting was superb throughout – from the bit players to Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damien Lewis as Henry VIII.

To my mind though, Claire Foy, who I had never heard of at the time, stole the show as a magnificent, complicated, wholly credible, Anne Boleyn.
Wolf Hall won many awards and although Foy was nominated for several she didn’t get one gong, when really she should have won ALL the awards.

In person Foy is nothing like Anne Boleyn (probably a good thing), she’s petite and bears a passing resemblance to Henry’s second ill-fated wife, but that’s it. The actress tells me that she was as excited as I was when she heard that Wolf Hall was being made into a TV series (we both agree that Hilary Mantel is a “genius”.)
Continue reading The Queen of the Small Screen Goes Big

How ‘The Crown’ Revived Our Love for the Queen

Sunday, Oct 22, 2017
How ‘The Crown’ Revived Our Love for the Queen

By: Marion Van Renterghem

The Queen is all secrets, mystery and muffled noise – ostensible blandness and unwavering tradition. Guests of Buckingham Palace must observe the golden rule: talk of politics, religion or gender is forbidden. “It limits conversational scope,” says Belgian journalist Marc Roche, a biographer of the Queen. Roche is almost the only reporter on the planet to have access to the press-fearing Windsors – a much-coveted privilege. A longtime London correspondent for French newspaper Le Monde, he has met the Queen six times. “Each time, she asked me the same three questions,” he says. “How long have you been in the UK? Do you like it? Isn’t it a wonderful place?” Once, she added a fourth. “Do you like my paintings?” A Rembrandt and a Rubens were hanging within arm’s reach, Roche recalls. “They are marvellous, Ma’am,” he replied. “Aren’t they just? My great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria bought them,” she said, before slipping away with small, hurried steps to speak to another guest.

Something unprecedented has happened to the Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In the Netflix series The Crown, she has become the heroine in a pacey and lavish account of her life, beginning with the final years of her father, George VI, the stammering king. Played by Claire Foy, Elizabeth II is the new star of the American video-streaming platform, which recently topped 100 million subscribers. This year, this blockbuster-budget American-British series took home two prestigious Golden Globes: Best Drama Series and Best Actress for Foy. The ten episodes of The Crown’s first series were released across ten countries simultaneously and critics were universal in their praise. Although Netflix keeps its audience figures close to its chest, its hurry to announce a second series, expected this November, confirms The Crown as a global success.

Read the full article here on GQ.

Claire Foy Breaks Her Silence On Playing Lisbeth Salander

Tuesday, Oct 10, 2017
Claire Foy Breaks Her Silence On Playing Lisbeth Salander

By: Ben Barna

Last month, it was announced that Claire Foy would be playing everyone’s favorite Swedish cyberpunk Lisbeth Salander in the upcoming adaptation of The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Landing the coveted role caps off a breakout year for the 33-year-old-British actress, a year in which she also won a Golden Globe for her role as Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s popular drama The Crown. This morning, Foy was in New York promoting her new romantic drama Breathe, opposite Andrew Garfield, but was more than willing to discuss how she is approaching a role that was last played by Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Noomi Rapace before her.

You’re taking on this iconic role that was portrayed by two other actresses. Do you completely throw those out the window?
I watched them before it was even a twinkle in my eye that I’d be doing this. So I can’t throw that away because I loved those performances and I loved watching them, so I don’t want to. I trained in theater, and if you train in theater, you’re aware that if you play a Shakespeare part, a hundred thousand other women played that part. I don’t really buy that idea. I think the idea with Lisbeth Salander is that she keeps going. It’s sort of like James Bond in the sense that she does keep going. You know it could be a complete disaster, and I’m not Rooney Mara, as much as I would like to be.

Do you have any idea what your look is going to be for the character?
No, I mean it’s my decision, quite frankly. I’m not going play a part where I’m told how to look because that’s weird. I think for me and Fede [Alvarez], the director, our main goal is to start from scratch and not assume anything, not assume that because that’s an iconic image, that therefore that is how I have to look and how I have to be, because I think you’ve got to honor the books, but this is the David Lagercrantz version—it’s a reinvention of the story. And that doesn’t mean we’re going to go mental and start doing all sorts of weird things, but, as with any characters that I build, it has to be from the ground up. It’s got to make sense, it’s got to come from where she is in her life there. Time has moved on, she’s changed, she’s a different woman. She’s been through so many things.

Is she older?
She’s slightly older, yeah. I don’t think it’s actually set because she’s supposed to be timeless. I don’t think she’s 33, which is my age. I’m pretty sure she’s not. If she was, it’d be a whole other story line with aging and wrinkles.

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