Peter Morgan changed the ending of “The Crown” because of the Queen's death
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The Queen is dead, long live The Crown.
When Queen Elizabeth II died on Sept. 8, 2022 after reigning for 70 years (the longest in British history), it marked the end of an era — and it also meant that creator Peter Morgan needed to address the historic event in his Netflix series about the monarch, The Crown.
Morgan told Variety that the Queen's death simply could not be left unaddressed in the series, despite the fact that its sixth and final season will end around 2005, nearly two decades before Elizabeth's actual passing.
"We'd all been through the experience of the funeral," he said "So because of how deeply everybody will have felt that, I had to try and find a way in which the final episode dealt with the character's death, even though she hadn't died yet."
Netflix Imelda Staunton on 'The Crown'
Morgan did originally consider making Queen Elizabeth's death the official end of the series, but she outlasted that idea once he decided to conclude the show in 2005. "It was the cutoff to keep it historical, not journalistic," he explained. "I think by stopping almost 20 years before the present day, it's dignified."
On Thursday, the first trailer for Part One of season 6 of The Crown dropped. It features clips from the first four episodes of the final season, which hit Netflix on Nov. 16 (the season is being divided into two parts and the second half will hit the platform on Dec. 14).
As expected, Part One will focus heavily on Princess Diana's death in a car accident, as well as the tragedy's emotional fallout within the royal family and their struggles to privately attend to their grief, while also address a mourning nation.
The first part of the series stars Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth, Jonathan Pryce as Prince Philip, Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret, Dominic West as Prince Charles, Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana, and Salim Daw as Mohamed Al Fayed.
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