THE creators of The Crown have revealed that making the hit show has now cost them at least £300million – a figure that dwarfs any previous estimates for the historical drama.
And that wasn’t just the wage bill for the star-studded cast.
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The budget also went on a whopping 2,448 sets they had to build from scratch in locations around the globe — which meant a different set appeared, on average, every 75 seconds over the six series.
It’s the kind of scale and budget normally reserved for big-screen blockbusters, and came about because the producers had just made Oscar-winning movie The Queen, with Helen Mirren as Her Majesty, and had intended The Crown to be a film too.
The huge expense won’t surprise fans of the lavishly produced Netflix show, who are already pinning their hopes on it returning with a spin-off movie after the sixth and final TV series drops this autumn.
Executive producer Andy Harries said: “It started as a movie idea, actually.
The writer Peter Morgan sent me a few paragraphs about doing a young Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill.
“He wondered if that had the same kind of power and gravitas as The Queen — the movie that he and I had done together.
“Then we started chatting about it and he said, ‘Well, there’s lots more we could do — we could turn it into a mini-series.
“But we’ve got to have a huge budget, we’ve got to have a lot of money — we’ve got to do it properly.’
“The kind of money we were looking for ended up at about £5million an episode.
“If you want great work, you’ve got to make sure you can achieve it by money, truthfully, and do it properly.”
Experts had previously estimated the series cost around £1million per episode, and even this smaller budget would have made it one of the most expensive TV shows in history when it first aired in 2016.
The final £300million tally was racked up because, by the time the sixth series lands, the team on The Crown will have created 60, hour-long episodes.
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Not surprisingly, when Andy and Peter first tried to get a broadcasting buyer ten years ago, British channels were interested but couldn’t stump up the money, while potential US investors were interested only in Princess Diana.
It was Netflix that finally agreed to buy into the idea of a “love letter” to the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, with a cast of actors that changed every two seasons.
Bosses said this was essential, but acknowledged it was also a risk.
Speaking at a “Secrets Of The Crown” session at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Andy said: “I don’t think there was any way you could find a cast from the Fifties that went right through the ages — we had to make that decision right up front.
“Peter always thought ‘three queens’ and therefore three casts under her.
“But, wonderfully, no television show has ever done that before. Would it work? You never really know.
“We weren’t even sure if people would buy Helen Mirren as Elizabeth in The Queen.
“But because that had worked, we got used to the idea that you could cast actors that would not necessarily look absolutely the same but would inhabit the part.”
Claire Foy played the young Queen from the Forties to the Sixties, Olivia Colman took over from the Sixties to the Nineties and Imelda Staunton from the Nineties to 2005, the point when the show is due to end.
Along with the rest of the cast, all three have been showered with praise for playing Her Maj, and a few fledgling actors have had their careers launched along the way, too.
They include Emma Corrin, who is now a big star of stage and screen after she played the young Princess Diana in season four of The Crown opposite Josh O’Connor as Prince Charles.
Executive producer Suzanne Mackie recalls how Emma was hired almost by accident when they needed to bring in a student actor at the last minute to perform an audition opposite Emerald Fennell who was being teed up to play the young Camilla Parker Bowles.
Unlike the usual casting process, which often takes weeks or months, they realised within minutes they had stumbled across the right person to play the former Princess of Wales.
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‘WE’VE FOUND HER’
Suzanne said: “It was one of the most special moments of my career.
“I just remember walking into this office after a long day of casting and there was this young woman on the reception sofa and she leapt up to let me in, not knowing who I was and me not knowing who she was. There was something about her — there really was.
“Then I realised, ‘Oh, she’s here to read for Diana!’ and within about an hour of her coming in and doing the reading she was spectacular and we all just looked at each other and said: ‘That’s it, we’ve found her!’
“And I remember racing after her afterwards and I said, ‘Emma, that was extraordinary!’
“I just gave her a hug because I felt this very strong instinct about her. And she was fantastic.”
As well as the cost of hiring the cast of top actors, a huge amount of money went into other areas, such as research, because Peter wanted less well-known stories from history to feature — not just the “greatest hits” most people are familiar with.
Annie Sulzberger, head of research, scoured pages of old court circulars detailing which members of the royal household and staff were where on any given day, to provide a full background to all the stories.
They went into extraordinary detail on props too, ranging from checking what kind of fountain pen the Queen would have used to what paint was used in the portraits that featured in various scenes.
The wedding dress Claire wore in the first series was a replica of Elizabeth’s 1947 Normal Hartnell gown, recreated at a cost of £30,000.
Production designer Martin Childs said: “All of that detail needs to be there because the tip of the Queen’s fountain pen is going to be the same size as Buckingham Palace when you see it on screen.
“Or if Claire, or Olivia or Imelda are using it, I think it helps their performance to have something authentic.”
The look of the show was crucial, which is why the creatives went to such lengths to build thousands of different sets. A large number of them were taken up just by depicting Buckingham Palace, which is at the heart of the drama.
Andy said: “Right at the very beginning, we thought, ‘We’ll just build a few sets for the palace’ and we all went on a public tour around Buckingham Palace.
“And we all said, ‘Christ, it’s HUGE!’ So we had to have a long list of luxury houses around London that we used instead.”
In the end, they built replicas of the exterior of the palace and the Queen’s private apartments from scratch, but had to use 16 different houses to represent the various sections inside the landmark building.
Nothing proved as easy as first thought. That included the idea of filming scenes set on the Royal Yacht Britannia on the decommissioned vessel, which is now a floating museum in Edinburgh.
Martin said: “That was my first ever recce. We wanted to find out if we could shoot on the real thing and we went to look at it and it’s been SO turned into a museum that it wouldn’t have been possible to shoot on it at all.
“Plus, you could never shoot because at the time there was a branch of Debenhams next to it — so it proved to be very difficult.
“As the season went on, Britannia had become seven separate locations — four of which we built.”
Now the whole team are going through the bittersweet process of seeing the decade-long project reach completion with series six, which will introduce a new generation of actors as Princes William and Harry.
It will also feature a first look at the young Kate Middleton, who is now the Princess of Wales, and the challenging task of sensitively revisiting the death of Princess Diana, who is now played by Elizabeth Debicki, opposite Dominic West as Charles.
But the team cannot quite take stock of their baby just yet because, despite the launch date on Netflix being just weeks away, they are still putting the final touches on the last ten episodes.
Exec producer Suzanne said: “It’s still in the editing, it still demands of us every day. I feel very mixed emotions about it ending. It’s been a part of my life for ten years.
“But we’re all deeply proud of The Crown.”
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