The Crown creator defends King Charles storyline after backlash
21 October 2022, 11:25
Watch the trailer for The Crown season 5
Writer of The Crown Peter Morgan says he has 'enormous sympathy' for King Charles.
The Crown creator Peter Morgan has defended the new series after ongoing criticism.
Season five of the Netflix show is set in the 1990s and is expected to cover King Charles and Diana's separation, as well as some trouble with the Queen.
Peter has now said that the show isn't ‘unkind’ to Charles but the 1990s was a tough time for the whole family.
He told Variety: "I think we must all accept that the 1990s was a difficult time for the royal family, and King Charles will almost certainly have some painful memories of that period.
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"But that doesn’t mean that, with the benefit of hindsight, history will be unkind to him, or the monarchy. The show certainly isn’t. I have enormous sympathy for a man in his position — indeed, a family in their position. People are more understanding and compassionate than we expect sometimes."
This comes after Dame Judi Dench became the latest high-profile figure to call for a disclaimer to be added to The Crown to make clear the series is not necessarily true.
The actress said Netflix ‘seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism’.
She added there is a risk that ‘a significant number of viewers’ would take its events as historical truth.
But Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Princess Diana, has also defended the show, saying the series has been handled with ‘sensitivity and truth’.
She said: "Peter and the entire crew of this job do their utmost to really handle everything with such sensitivity and truth and complexity, as do actors.
"The amount of research and care and conversations and dialogue that happen over, from a viewer’s perspective, something probably that you would never ever notice is just immense."
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She added: "From that very first meeting [with] Peter, I knew that I’d entered into this space where this was taken seriously [in] a deeply caring way. So that’s my experience of the show."
The comments come after Netflix also released a statement defending the drama after a spokesperson for Sir John Major described the series as ‘damaging’.
"The Crown has always been presented as a drama based on historical events,” they said.
"Series five is a fictional dramatisation, imagining what could have happened behind closed doors during a significant decade for the Royal Family - one that has already been scrutinised and well-documented by journalists, biographers and historians."
