In its 6 seasons, The Crown has had one of the most exciting ensembles in television history. The show features some of Great Britain’s finest actors from well-known stars like Olivia Colman, Jonathan Pryce, and Helena Bonham Carter to some of the most exciting younger actors working today like Claire Foy, Vanessa Kirby, and Australian Actress Elizabeth Debicki.
Casting Director Robert Sterne, who cast the epic series Game of Thrones with similar panache, took the reins for the entire run of The Crown which completed its triumphant run this past winter. It has been nominated for and won dozens of acting awards and is nominated for many awards this Emmy season. Sterne recently caught up with Immersive via Zoom.
[Note: This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]
You were there from the beginning of The Crown. How do you look back at the start of the show?
One of the very first conversations about this ambition to create a project that was going to go over X number of years, X number of seasons, and the whole idea of this unique casting challenge about how this was going to work, that it was the way we were going to do it, not have ever-increasing layers of makeup on Claire Foy. We were going to just change it up every two years and see how that went. And that seemed to be the most interesting way of telling the story of these people with such well-documented lives across such a long period of time.
It’s been really interesting to just have the opportunity to see it through. Sometimes when you start these things, the ambition is for X number of seasons and you don’t get the opportunity to do that. So with this one, to have done it from start, to have the ambition to do the six, to go from start to end over that period, and have three different casts, has been a really interesting challenge.
What’s it like working on something based on very famous real people? What qualities do you seek to capture?
It adds another layer to it, doesn’t it? Because you’ve got to kind of work out who these people are so well-documented in their life, especially as the time frame gets nearer to the present day. They’re such well-documented lives, and people have such clear memories of certainly in the season six bit of major significance events in their lives. I think the fact that it is real, people have added a great dimension to it for both in terms of us thinking about how we’re going to approach it. In terms of the actors, the actors have all risen to the challenge of having to portray sensitively, these people.
I mean, you’re in a situation where you’ve got the script, so you’ve got how they function in Peter Morgan’s world, and then you’ve got a wealth of resources about who they were and what they did and what they said and books that they’ve appeared in. So, there’s this great wealth of material to draw from, and then you’ve got to work out who sits in all that best.
Also, I think we were very keen not to do impersonations or lookalikes in terms of approaching these characters. That was something that appealed to the actors as well as they came into it as well, that they weren’t going to take that particular shortcut. I mean, we just want to represent as many colors of the real-life characters’ complex lives as possible.
Were there any unique challenges for the current season or any sort of great surprises like, wow, I’m glad that worked out?
Dominic West and Olivia Williams had an amazing dynamic between them as Charles and Camilla. Those characters are so well known and so well documented and live so strongly in people’s lives. They made them authentic to me. They created something between them that was very, very clever, I thought.
Elizabeth Debicki did such an amazing job, too.
I don’t think that anybody could have played that part better than Elizabeth Debicki at that stage, at that character, at that stage in her life. We were blessed with Emma Corrin and then to move on to the next kind of manifestation of that character. I thought Elizabeth’s performance was pitch perfect on a technical level in terms of what she had to do, but also just in terms of the connection with that individual and the emotional intelligence that she brought to, and just some real magic to it.
And the contrast with Emma Corrin is very uniquely interesting.
It was interesting as part of the casting process, because when we knew that we were heading towards having to cast Diana, Diana was going to have to be in two forms, two manifestations of it. I just had to remember Peter Morgan kept saying, “Just remember when we first met Diana, this character is a schoolgirl. She’s very young. She’s not the Diana that we know from the Mario Testino images later on that people have in their heads.”
Interesting to cast different people in the same part, because you suddenly realize that people are very different individuals at different stages in their lives.
It’s very true. We didn’t know whether that was going to work and how we were going to make it, how exactly, or from a casting perspective we were going to make that work.
Yes, it’s good to keep people in the correct time frame.
I just remember round the table, the very first conversation 10 years ago, this is the way to tell this story. And that’s how Peter wanted to write and do it. Just to have been able to go through that process and see how it works has been brilliant. Every two years there’s a read-through where the new family sit around the table and all look at each other for the first time, and we think, right, how’s this going to go when you see them all together for the first time and then they’re off?
It’s exciting. I think it kept the show fresh too. You had different people playing off each other.
I think that the younger and older bits of it speak to each other, and I just think the qualities of, I dunno, Jonathan Pryce, you’ve got the particular qualities of Matt Smith in the first manifestation, and then Tobias Menzies who hits a more kind of thoughtful stage in his life, and he did that so brilliantly. And then you’ve got all those kinds of alpha male and spiritual qualities all happening at the same time. And Jonathan Pryce is great.
So now that this is wrapped up, and I ask everyone this, it must feel like such an achievement being on the other end of it now. What is the afterglow, if you will, of The Crown in its final season?
It’s just you start with the ambition to do something, and then to be able to see that through from start to finish is very satisfying. Also, the fact that over that nine-year period that you’ve been working on it, you’ve got to build up relationships with all the people who work on it and lean in on all the other departments that make it what it is.
As time goes past, you realize that you’ve got all these resources with you so that the casting made the connections between the various departments, like the connections between the hair and the makeup and the costume. Our department got stronger and stronger as we were trying to create these characters as it moved forward and just getting a shorthand.
The research department was just amazing because could give all this information, every character that we had, they had a little sheet of paper, potted information about who that character was, where they were born, where they were educated, pictures of them at that particular stage in life that we were looking at. We had all this stuff to play around with and look at, which was great.
Lastly, what is something that you feel like the general public doesn’t know about casting? If you want to educate people on the process.
Okay, so for example, we had to find the young William and Harry on this. There’s an opportunity there for completely unknown people to come in, and it’s a big challenge. They’ve got demanding and sensitive and well-documented storylines to deliver, and you are dealing with teens who’ve got to walk into it is quite a big deal to come and do these characters. I suppose I’d say that the casting process is like that. We keep it open.
We are a wide-open search. We would determine that if there was somebody out there who wanted to be considered for these parts, then we were there to facilitate that opportunity and that we were also there to create a supportive environment in which young people, no screen experience can learn how to be or can start thinking about how to be free and confident and creative in front of a camera whilst portraying significant life events of real-life people.
I don’t go into it with a set of rules about how it works. I’ve got to create an environment in which these people can give their best, and people have very different ways into how to come into a room and start that process. Some people want lots of chats before you start about it. Some people just want to get in there and do it. It is the levels of what people need in the room to give what they want, and that’s what I was there to provide for them, rather than a set of do’s and don’ts from a casting director.
The Crown Seasons 1-6 are all available to stream on Netflix.
