Following Claire Foy’s admission that she’ll be relieved to leave her role in ‘The Crown’ after two series, ITV bosses have been quick to make clear that their own queen - Jenna Coleman as a young Victoria - is going nowhere.
Claire has already scooped a Golden Globe gong and a BAFTA nomination for her role in the lush Netflix drama, but she admitted at the BFI & Radio Times Television Festival at the weekend, that the producers’ decision to recast her after two seasons in the role has left her “relieved”.
She explained: “We always knew when we signed up to it, and also not to be funny but it’s also a real plus.
“As an actor there’s nothing worse than the sound of ‘seven years’. I’m sure to some people it sounds amazing but to us it’s like, seven years of playing the same person? And this is a tough job, you know? It’s long, a good nine-monther. And that’s a lot of your life that you sign over to it.”
At the same Festival, ‘Victoria’s creator Daisy Goodwin made the point that she’s very happy to keep Jenna Coleman in the role for a while yet.
“I think we’ve got quite a long way to go before we need to re-cast Jenna; we’re moving quite slowly through the 1840s,” she said.
‘Victoria’ will be returning in the autumn, with Jenna Coleman paired with her real-life flame Tom Hughes playing her husband Albert. The second series will see the young queen cope with the demands of a growing family, while Albert continues to cause ruffles at court with his progressive ideas.
‘The Crown’s makers have already revealed that the second series of the award-winning drama - which surprisingly nudged out ‘The Night Manager’ in yesterday’s BAFTA TV Awards nominations - will cover the next period in the Queen’s reign, when relations with her husband the Duke of Edinburgh became increasingly strained, and her sister Margaret rebounded from her doomed romance with Peter Townsend into a marriage with the charismatic photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones.
