Imelda Staunton on becoming Queen Elizabeth II

Imelda Staunton felt strange. It was the day after the late Queen Elizabeth II had been laid to rest, and the celebrated 66-year-old English actress was back on set of The Crown, dressed in another immaculately crafted reproduction of the regent’s royal regalia, unsure of how she could manage to get herself into character.

For the last 10 days, Imelda had watched an outpouring of love from across the world unseen since perhaps the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The crew had immediately paused filming after news broke of her passing on set, and so Imelda had mostly been sitting at home, overwhelmed more by the grief of millions than by her own.

“The outpouring of emotion from across the world, particularly in England and in London, was now suddenly an added ingredient for me into playing a woman who is already known everywhere,” Staunton tells Harper’s Bazaar Arabia.

‘How could I play that?’ she wondered. Then, as she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, seeing an image of the late Queen looking back at her, she realised what she had to do—push it all away.

“The thing about the Queen is she had a complete lack of ego. There’s no vanity—the only important thing to her is doing her job. Everyone else pours all this adulation onto this person, but she didn’t demand it. I had to just walk past it and step into a different corridor of her life,” says Imelda, the third actress to play the Queen in the series following Claire Foy and Olivia Colman.

Imelda is currently still hard at work filming The Crown’s sixth season. The fifth, which is set to premiere on Netflix on November 9th is, undoubtedly, the most anticipated in the acclaimed show’s history, not only because it is the first to premiere in the wake of the Queen’s passing, but also because it documents the turbulent 90s in which the British royal family was embroiled in scandal after scandal as Princess Diana and Prince Charles’ marriage publicly fell into tatters.

For Jonathan Pryce, who takes over duties as the Queen’s beloved husband Prince Philip from Tobias Menzies, his understanding of how to play these people came the day that he met Diana back in the 1990s himself, when the princess came to meet him after one of his plays.

“There were about 30 people lined up to shake her hand, and I could see then how everyone reacted to her. She did give off something, but it was more to do with what we gave her. I think that’s what she found difficult, I think. The look on her face said to me, ‘why are people being like this to me? I just want to be normal.’”

That’s the reason that The Crown has resonated across the globe, though it is but the latest in a long line of fictional depictions, Imelda thinks. Ultimately, the people they are playing are not too far off from the people they presented themselves to be in public, though of course with rich inner lives held at bay behind their polite smiles and kind eyes.

“We’ve stayed true to the public personas, and just bent them slightly behind closed doors. That’s why it feels true. The Queen was in many respects a very good person who had great faith and integrity, and a wee bit of humor,” says Staunton.

“I have a feeling that I’m going to really miss being able to tap into her qualities when it’s over.”

This piece originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar Arabia