Tag: interviews

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.
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Claire Foy & Matt Smith on TODAY

Wednesday, Dec 6, 2017
Claire Foy & Matt Smith on TODAY

Claire Foy on The Tonight Show with Starring Jimmy Fallon

Wednesday, Dec 6, 2017
Claire Foy on The Tonight Show with Starring Jimmy Fallon

Claire Foy & Matt Smith on AOL Build

Monday, Dec 4, 2017
Claire Foy & Matt Smith on AOL Build

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.
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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.
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Claire Foy on The Graham Norton Show

Monday, Oct 30, 2017
Claire Foy on The Graham Norton Show

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”.)
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