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Why Queen Elizabeth II's Pop Culture Currency Will Remain Strong

Playing the Queen in prestige dramas has been a sure-fire way to clean up at awards ceremonies. Hence, the continued attraction. But there is more to it than getting the wig right, and acting aloof.

Why Queen Elizabeth II's Pop Culture Currency Will Remain Strong
(L-R) Stella Gonet in Spencer, Dame Helen Mirren in The Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy in Netflix's The Crown

Last Updated: 07.04 PM, Sep 09, 2022

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Midway through Spencer, Queen Elizabeth (Stella Gonet) serves a blunt reminder to Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart). It’s the only time the two royals exchange any words across the runtime of Pablo Larraín’s film. But the words spoken are telling. The Queen explains that no matter how much the press and the public may love her daughter-in-law, at the end of the day, she is little else but “currency.” Once you are a royal, image, identity, information — all of it is mere currency.

In the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s death on Thursday, the British national anthem may get a revamp and the pound a rebrand. Her face may soon be replaced on a currency that continues to weaken. But her pop culture currency may not weaken so soon, seeing as a new season of The Crown is imminent. Throughout her 70-year reign, the late Queen was a nation’s figurehead as well as a media fixture. Public fascination around her seemed to stem not in spite of her reticence but because of it. The calculated opacity of her being, is what made her a cultural curiosity. If she was an anachronism, it was not just because she was a 21st century monarch, it was also because she was an under-sharer in an era of over-sharers.

Being a royal figure always under public scrutiny, she understood she had to be two different people. As Prince Charles tells Diana in Spencer, “There’s the real one and the one they take pictures of.” The push and pull between the two lies at the heart of the drama in The Crown. If the depiction is a little more sympathetic in the Netflix series, others are a little more reluctant to curtsey to a British monarch whose colonial legacy should never be forgotten. Over the years, the Queen has been played by Dame Helen Mirren, parodied by SNL veteran Fred Armisen, animated by The Simpsons and Family Guy, and robbed by Hrithik Roshan and the Minions.

Playing the Queen in prestige dramas has been a sure-fire way to clean up at awards ceremonies. Hence, the continued attraction. But there is more to it than getting the wig right and acting aloof. The most compelling on-screen portrayals walk the fine line between impersonation and sublimation, bridging the gap between the monarch’s public and private lives with a measured interiority. Instead of condensing nine decades of her life into a two-hour runtime, the films focus on a brief period or a single milestone.

As a young princess in The King’s Speech (2010), Freya Wilson brings a sweet and playful presence, ready with supportive feedback for her father struggling to overcome his stutter. Sarah Gadon, in A Royal Night Out (2015), inhabits the perspective of a 19-year-old excited to celebrate the end of World War II with her sister Margaret by going on an incognito adventure outside the walls of Buckingham Palace. Both show us an Elizabeth before she was asked to shoulder the burden of crown and country.

The Crown begins with an Elizabeth after she was asked to — at the age of 25. Over the first two seasons, Claire Foy charts the evolution of a young queen full of uncertainties over being handed a role she isn’t ready to take on. The more she eases into it and comes to accept the required conformity, the more it affects her relationship with her family. Taking over from Foy, Olivia Colman embraces the stoic persona we have come to associate the Queen with. Beginning with Harold Wilson’s election in Season 3 and ending with Margaret Thatcher’s departure from office in Season 4, she must deal with a country caught in a variety of political and economic crises, while Charles and Diana struggle to stay together in a miserable marriage. Come Season 5, Imelda Staunton will take the reins from Colman. Keep the Emmys ready.

When it comes to pulling back the curtains on the private lives of the Queen and the Windsor family, The Crown creator Peter Morgan is something of a dab hand. He sure has been a key figure in shaping public perception of the royals in the 21st century. A decade before the Netflix series, he wrote the screenplay of Stephen Frears’ 2006 film The Queen, which chronicled the week after Diana’s death. Helen Mirren, in an Oscar-winning performance, conveyed the quiet struggle of Elizabeth, who is torn between addressing the tragedy as the public desired and ignoring it altogether as the protocol demanded.

Key milestones from The Crown also appear in other films and shows. The Michael Fagan encounter depicted in Season 4 is also recreated in the episode, “Walking The Dogs,” from the TV anthology Playhouse Presents, led by Emma Thompson as the Queen. Fagan was an intruder who broke into the palace and snuck into her bedroom for a heart-to-heart. While Spencer, like The Crown, showcases Diana’s struggles with eating and mood disorders, Larraín is more sparing in his use of the Queen as a character. But her limited screentime or dialogue (as already established) don’t make her role any less effective. A wordless stare from Stella Gonet’s Queen directed at Kristen Stewart’s Diana in a suffocatingly oppressive dinner scene feels so haunting the former’s presence looms large in spite of her absence for most of the film.

Plenty of on-screen depictions have softened the Queen’s stoic demeanour with outright silliness. Hrithik Roshan, in the opening set piece of Dhoom 2, skydives onto a moving train and disguises himself as Her Majesty to steal her crown. Thanks to an uncanny likeness, Jeannette Charles built an entire career playing the Queen in various comedies for three decades. Her resume includes a Queen saved from an assassination attempt by Leslie Nielsen in an episode of The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, a Queen who confers knighthood on Austin Powers in Goldmember, and a Queen who appears in a dream sequence in National Lampoon’s European Vacation among others.

If the real Queen was seen as a stuffy royal, her fictional counterpart allowed us to imagine a person with the ability to at least laugh at herself. And if the pop-cultural depictions range from reverent to irreverent, parodic to eulogistic, it’s because she was — and will always remain — a divisive figure.