Breaking Baz: ‘The Crown’s Bertie Carvel On Playing Tony Blair And The Time He Met The Real Queen “Nearly Head-Butting Her” At Buckingham Palace
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EXCLUSIVE: Tony- and Olivier Award-winning actor Bertie Carvel, who portrays Tony Blair opposite Imelda Staunton’s Queen Elizabeth II in the final season of The Crown, remembers meeting the the real Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace “and nearly head-butting” her “in my attempt to try not to be too obsequious, but to follow the right form.”
He still has a photo of him being introduced to the monarch at an event nine years ago. “I look like the Mr. Bean sketch where he bows and knocks her out. I’m so towering over the queen and I look like I really should have gone to the barber, and I was red-faced and hairy.”
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Well, The Crown’s crack hair and makeup team led by designer Cate Hall has ensured that he’s respectfully coiffured to portray Blair.
Proudly, he adds that on his fridge is the badge palace officials handed him at the event, which was to honor the queen’s patronage of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. “Everyone had to wear a badge with their name. It says “Bertie Carvel, actor. And it’s got a royal crest on it, and it’s the best thing,” he beamed.
He wasn’t the late majesty’s only guest that long-ago day.
Luminaries, all RADA graduates, included Joan Collins, Ralph Fiennes, John Hurt, Angela Lansbury, Mike Leigh, Roger Moore, Michael Sheen and — fanfare — Helen Mirren. The latter of course played Elizabeth in Stephen Frears’ movie The Queen and later in Peter Morgan’s play The Audience, directed by Stephen Daldry and produced by Andy Harries the chief executive of Left Bank Pictures.
The Audience, which explored QE2’s relationship with her prime ministers, was the springboard for what would become The Crown.
Carvel has form portraying figures in the political firmament; he played Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat who served as Deputy Prime Minister in David Cameron’s government, in Channel 4 drama Coalition. Clegg’s now president of global affairs for Meta.
The actor also bestrode the stage as Rupert Murdoch in James Graham’s scorching play Ink, which ran at the Almeida after which it transferred to the West End and Broadway; and for Mike Bartlett’s satire The 47th, at the Old Vic, he went under tanning lamps for his take on Donald Trump.
He chose not to meet his subjects ahead of playing them, though he subsequently met Clegg and Murdoch.
“And I haven’t met Mr. Trump. I was rather hoping he might turn up at the Old Vic, although that would have been a difficult performance,” he said.
The London-based actor was in two minds about whether to reach out to Blair’s team. “And then The Crown team were very keen that I shouldn’t, I think in order to sort of preserve this separation of church and state that we were making a drama.”
And there’s the rub. The Crown is a fictional drama and not, as some insist, a documentary.
I’m not necessarily equating Morgan as a modern-day equivalent to William Shakespeare, although why not? But Shakespeare’s dramatic history plays are about kings and queens and their principal courtiers, penned as drama, not fact.
Carvel nods in agreement. ”I think Shakespeare’s history plays are a really good reference point for what Peter’s doing. The Crown is a sort of harmonic layer, and there’s a sort of story of the week or a theme of the week, but if you zoom out and look at what’s he’s doing I think it’s going to be really interesting for people when the final season concludes to have the whole thing as a document and zoom right out and see the stories that he’s chosen to focus. And it’s just a story, but we all have a story abut our national identity.”
Carvel suggests it’s a story about the way that the national identity and consciousness “has changed in that extraordinary reign and how you can’t cover everything.”
And, of course, he can understand the sensitivity “of people feeling like, ‘That’s not how it happened.’ So my heart goes out to people who are portrayed or who have a close interest in those who are.”
A peek into Carvel’s ancestry helps understand what draws the thespian to portray real-life political figures in fictional circumstances.
The actor’s grandfather, Robert Carvel, was a legendary political editor of the Evening Standard and an eminent BBC broadcaster [I was a junior at the E. Standard back in the day and used to watch him in awe when he came to the office — it was like God popping in for a cup of tea]. When he died in 1990, the House of Commons tabled a motion lauding Carvel as “an outstanding political journalist.”
Great-grandfather John Carvel was a star newsman, political correspondent and editor of the now-defunct London evening Star and other newspapers.
“I’m interested in those stories because of that background, definitely true. I suppose I’ve been alert to that from a young age,” he says. “So I suppose I have a certain confidence in those. I mean, partly it’s just that they’re great parts, and one of the reasons I love about playing characters based on real people is the huge quantity of research material that’s out there.”
“One isn’t making a documentary, and one of the things that’s really exciting is to go, ‘Well, what am I bringing that a historian or documentary maker couldn’t?’ The more I do this, and this applies to fiction as well, the more I feel it’s okay to say, ‘I am an artist. I’m like a painter of portraits.’ ”
And he’ll look at the character from a painter’s point of view. “You want to know what the painters saw, why they chose that color, why they chose that light, why they chose to pose him in a zoom … And that’s what I can do as an actor that another biographer can’t,” he says.
He says there’s something about real people that he can pay very close attention to, ”but I’m bound not to copy it because I can’t. It’s impossible for me to be more Tony Blair than Tony Blair is.”
Carvel joked that Blair would be going, “ ‘No, I’m the real one. Poor man’s copy.’ And he’s probably right. But the aspiration is to say … I’m not really trying to tell you something about Tony Blair. I’m trying to tell you something about what it might be to be Prime Minister with this kind of queen.”
One key to helping him understand Blair was to study “stuff about his rhythm and his cadence. So I would kind of rewrite my scripts, lay them out almost like verse, particularly with verbatim stuff … I feel though he’s somebody, unlike me, who thinks very, very quickly. Here’s somebody who’s thinking quickly and fully and then choosing their words quite carefully, an extremely gifted communicator. That was interesting. I thought that there’s a sort of moral core, a moral zeal and drive, and a kind of steel, actually, a commitment to whatever decision he’d made. There are some lovely things about diction and dialect that were great keys,” he says, suddenly sounding more Blair than Blair.
It was a change from playing villains, Carvel says. “So it was really nice to sort of think about heroism,” even though Blair’s popularity dimmed because of reactions over invading Iraq.
There’s a notable moment in an episode of The Crown when he’s confronted by protestors carrying placards screaming “Bliar.” And that moniker stuck, Carvel says, “because it was being thrown at somebody of whom we felt we had cause to trust him.”
Carvel paraphrased a conversation he had with Morgan when they first met. “He said, ‘The betrayal that some people may have come to feel by Blair is conditioned by the fact that they were in love with him. It only hurts when…”
Blair took office as Prime Minister in May 1997. Four months later, when Princess Diana was killed in the car crash in Paris, it was Blair who instinctively read the mood of the country. His tribute to what he termed the People’s Princess captured the temperature of the nation.
However, the speech doesn’t feature in The Crown because there’s a sense that the scene had already been captured well by Michael Sheen in The Queen, directed by Frears and based on Morgan’s screenplay.
“Oh, I did say The People’s Princess,” Carvel says.
“I did it and we shot it,” he explains. “It was a sort of montage sequence that was in the original script of episode 4 … but that hasn’t made the cut.”
His best scenes are with Staunton’s QE2. Some are immensely moving even though, at times, there’s friction between them.
Both Staunton and Carvel share a desire to “get on with it” with little time for larking about.
Didn’t they corpse now and again, I asked.
“I’m afraid not, no. I mean, I think we’re both quite serious workers, and Imelda’s incredibly focused, incredibly well-prepared. Delightful, but very focused, as am I,” he says.
He laughs and says, “it’s not like I’m some kind of monk or something. I try and be pleasant.”
A couple of times he’s tried staying in character on set “and talking in my character’s voice. And often when I’m doing things where there is a kind of voice or a physicality, I don’t like to let it drop entirely…because it’s like putting on wet swimming trunks, and it starts to feel flakey.”
He adds though that “I certainly wouldn’t ask the crew to call me Tony, but I do try and stay in that zone. And I sense that Imelda was cut from the same cloth. We would have very pleasant chats, but it was very much about the work.”
And their work together is exemplary, capturing what one can only imagine the relationship might have been like was between the queen and her chief minister.
“I don’t know, I mean, of course one can’t know how the queen and Blair were during their audiences,” he says. “I play the scene as written, but one can’t know what went on in those conversations,” just as he has no idea what the queen felt politically. “Actually, we just can’t know.” That’s her great magic trick. One might make all kinds of assumptions, but one just doesn’t know what she felt politically. She was amazingly kind of absent, as the monarch should be, from politics.
“But I guess in The Crown one senses that she doesn’t much like the cut of Mr. Blair’s jib when he comes into office….but there’s a sort of mutual respect and a fondness, which I think is very moving and speaks to what, similarly, people out there, whatever they felt about the queen, the institution of monarchy ,will be a wide spectrum of views,” he explains.
He believes though that “people were pretty broadly united in this love for this monarch, this grandmother of the nation. I certainly felt felt that. I felt very powerfully a deep, deep respect.”
There’s something of that sensibility, a powerful emotional force, in the scenes Staunton and Carvel share.
“Blair, as the arch modernist, arch reformer, this kind of radical, almost zealot for moving the nation into the modern era, couldn’t in some ways be more diametrically opposed to what the queen represents. And yet there’s a meeting of two minds who are steering the great ship of state, and it’s very moving to see that on a human level.”
I also found that to be the case as I watched Staunton and Carvel in their scenes, particularly moments during the six episodes that will launch on Netflix beginning December 14.
Meanwhile, Carvel’s gearing up to work in front of and behind the camera to direct two episodes for the third season of the British crime drama Dalgliesh, based on the novels by P.D. James. “First time I’ve directed on screen,” he says, and he’s keen to do more — and keep acting as well.
He recently completed a run at the Old Vic playing Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion. And, who knows, he might also find time to return to the stage later next year or the year after.
Perhaps he’ll play a wise king modeled on the wise queen he played opposite in The Crown.
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