‘The Crown’ Season 4 Finally Has a Release Date!!
Friends, streamers, Anglophiles, lend me your ears—because The Crown season 4 is creeping steadily closer, and if you’re like many of the other fans absolutely obsessed with the true-life story of the house of Windsor, you’ve been ready for quite some time now. Not to offend Queen Elizabeth II or the Duke of Edinburgh or anything, but season 4 of The Crown is basically when the interesting stuff starts—like Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding, the births of Princes William and Harry, etc. You know, the stuff people go crazy for. If you can’t wait a single second more to see all that drama unfold, here’s what we know about season 4 so far.
We finally have a release date!!
And a trailer!! Netflix released this bad boy this morning, and apparently, new episodes are coming our way in November. Mark your calendars!
The monarchy. Above all else. @GillianA and Emma Corrin join Olivia Colman in Season Four of The Crown, arriving 15th November. pic.twitter.com/Z4RPvzb32R
— The Crown (@TheCrownNetflix) August 20, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic has derailed all semblance of normalcy when it comes to television production and releases. But somehow, The Crown pulled off finishing its season in the midst of everything. Apparently, a few scenes they wanted to shoot didn’t get done before the pandemic, so they’ll never make it to the final cut.
Show creator Peter Morgan told IndieWire, “For the final block, one director [Jessica Hobbs] was filming three separate episodes. A couple of scenes were missing from each one. Having looked at them, we [could] just about get away with it. She will forever rue not being able to shoot them. The price of waiting would have meant to not get the show out on the same schedule. And nobody to whom I’ve shown the episodes can tell what’s missing. I’m really relieved.”
The story will focus on the Margaret Thatcher years.
Netflix announced in September 2019, per The Crown’s Twitter account, that Gillian Anderson of The X-Files and Sex Education fame would step in to play Margaret Thatcher, aka the Iron Lady, who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. Per The Independent, Queen Elizabeth II and Thatcher were not that close and were “different” people, so we’ll see what kind of battle royales might exist between Gillian and Olivia Colman, who plays the queen.
In an interview with Deadline, Tobias Menzies, who plays Prince Philip, discussed his scenes with Gillian as Thatcher. “She was looking remarkable, looking incredibly like Thatcher,” he said. “I was a youngster in the ’80s, and Thatcher was kind of the bogeywoman in our household. It’s funny now that I’m doing a drama where I’m in a scene with this woman. It will be interesting to see how that is received. All the other political figures are far enough in the past that there is less heat around them.”
There will be an intruder in the palace.
According to the Daily Mail, in 1982, a man named Michael Fagan scaled the walls of Buckingham Palace and wandered into the queen’s bedroom. That’s, uh, a serious security breach, no? He passed barbed wire and spikes and allegedly climbed a drainpipe just for a peek at QEII. Tom Brooks will play him on The Crown.
Prince Charles and Prince Philip will get more father-son time.
In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Josh O’Connor, who plays Prince Charles, revealed that season 4 will give more screen time to the complicated dynamic between Charles and his father.
“In my head, [Charles and Philip] are just not compatible, really,” he said. “Princess Anne, I suppose, fits in better with Philip, whereas Charles is more sensitive, more emotionally articulate. We certainly talked about that, but as you say, it’s touched on but not brilliantly, not extensively in this series. But certainly, the aim is to do a bit more of that, share a bit more of that in series 4.”
Of course, daddy issues will be far from the only struggles Charles must face in season 4. After having his love for Camilla Shand disrupted by his own family, he’s in a tricky place. Which might lead him to make some, uh, questionable decisions.
“There’s this scene with the queen where Charles says, ‘We know what this does. We know what meddling with love does in this family. We should know better,’” Josh told Harper’s Bazaar. “And I think he’s right. It feels we’ve seen the repercussions of what happened to Margaret. Look what that did to her mental health, her well-being. Basically, we end [season 3] with Charles feeling…I mean, it’s another knock back, essentially, and now he has to start again. And what that means for series 4, of course, is with the time with Diana and things like that.”
Princess Margaret will have a major health scare.
In 1985, the heavy-smoking princess had a lung removed, and the show will grapple with her recovery. “She smoked 60 cigarettes a day with the knowledge that her father died of lung cancer at 54,” Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Margaret, told Town & Country. “She had a lung removed, and she carried on smoking. She was a total addict. There was too much of her life that she was allowed to get lost inside her head, and I think that’s the unfortunate thing.”
There are at least two more seasons to go.
Of course, as soon as season 4 airs, we’ll want more. Fret not: There are two more seasons remaining after the next chapter. Netflix boss Ted Sarandos told the Hollywood Reporter in 2016 that each season of The Crown would span about a decade in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, so 60 years = 6 seasons.
And in July 2020, Netflix confirmed exactly that: The show will span a total of six seasons. At one point, the cast wanted to cut back to five seasons, but the July announcement reneged on that plan.
“As we started to discuss the storylines for series 5, it soon became clear that in order to do justice to the richness and complexity of the story, we should go back to the original plan and do six seasons,” Morgan announced.
During seasons 5 and 6, Imelda Staunton (Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter series!!) will step into the role of Queen Elizabeth, with Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret and Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana. We’re still awaiting additional casting announcements.
Season 4 will feel less like a historical piece.
Olivia told Entertainment Weekly that filming with Gillian into season 4 makes her job as queen feel “less” like a historical piece. “It feels quite different. We had our read-through, and to hear the voices of Margaret Thatcher and all of that, it’s quite fun,” she said.
This post will be updated as more season 4 information becomes available.
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