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when The crown debuted in 2016, starting a six-season run through more than 50 years of British history, with a climax always slated for season four. That episode, which will premiere on Netflix on Sunday, shows the courtship of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, the story that, through a perfect fusion of fairy tale, politics and celebrity, has fascinated the English-speaking world for 20 years.
But when it came time to promote this season, Netflix relegated Charles and Diana to the second half of the trailer. The first voice we hear, in fact, does not belong to any of the royal family. Instead, it is the high breath of Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson.
The cable and streaming services are filled to the bone with high-budget dramas about recent history events, from The right things for Comey’s rule to the various anthology series by Ryan Murphy. Part of the thrill of such shows is seeing famous (or infamous) historical figures depicted on the small screen and examined in depth. The crown it is no different, particularly when a famous and credited actor, such as Olivia Colman or John Lithgow, enters the role.
But within that universe, no combination of actor and historical figure has potential, such importance, as the combination of Anderson and Thatcher. It is not just that The crown is introducing her most important political character since Lithgow’s Churchill, or the enthusiasm that a fantastic actress like Anderson is getting the chance to star in the sandbox that has kept all actors in the UK working for the past five years.
It is the unique variety of possibilities offered by this performance: what can This actor, one of the most beloved figures on TV of the last 30 years, that’s enough This role?
Anderson took on her career-defining role at just 25, when she was almost a newcomer to film and television. The X-Files was first presented in 1993, and told the story of two FBI special agents – Anderson’s Dana Scully and David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder – who solved mysteries that straddled the criminal and the supernatural. Visually, the show was for most of its time, with Scully’s’ 90s hairstyle and curtain coats. But it also formed one of the most loved and culturally influential business collaborations ever featured on TV. Mulder’s impulsiveness and tenacity blended perfectly with Scully’s cautious rationality from the pilot, and both actors imbued their characters with heart, humor and charm, transforming them from ordinary TV cops to Kirk and Spock for Gen X. .
Over nine seasons, a feature film and two revivals, The X-Files they turned Anderson and Duchovny into superstars and cult heroes for fans of science fiction and speculative fiction. The words “Dana Scully” will, no doubt, appear in the first line of Anderson’s obituary.
Very few actors manage to play such a popular and enduring character as Scully, and fewer still play such a role without it seeping into the background of every television and film appearance that follows, including, and perhaps most importantly, shows that dramatize recent history. These programs tend to build large, detailed universes and populate them with famous actors. And sometimes it’s hard to completely separate an actor from his final role: David Schwimmer’s Robert Kardashian-di-Ross Geller in The People vs. OJ Simpson, or Patrick J. Adams inviting “Space-Clothes“Jokes like John Glenn in The right things. The crown it is by no means immune; Matt Smith was fantastic as Prince Philip in the first two seasons of the series, but that was how long it took for Smith to show up on screen without inviting. Doctor who theme in the subconscious of the spectators.
If Anderson entered this role with little but Scully in his bag, that wouldn’t be the end of the world. That effort required the same precision, scope and subtlety that most actors will ever have used. But Anderson has spent the past decade in television roles that have allowed her to show off her skills while completely leaving her iconic character behind.
Anderson is back in the world of television cops for The fall, a three-season British-Irish crime drama premiered in 2013. The fall it’s certainly imperfect – it’s relentlessly dark, often overwritten and obvious, and awkwardly mapped out – but it’s worth watching because of a couple of absolutely mesmerizing performances by its protagonists: Jamie Dornan as Belfast serial killer Paul Spector and Anderson as by Stella Gibson, the police investigator in charge of hunting him down.
Stella is the anti-Scully: arrogant, ruthless and disdainful of rules. He hops in and out of bed with several colleagues in 17 episodes and offers heavy monologues on sex, gender and violence. In the hands of a minor actress, Stella may have been a one-dimensional superhero, an indomitable ice queen who saves the day. But Anderson plays it with incredible warmth and finesse.
On the other end of the spectrum is Jean Milburn’s Sex education, a crazy and carefree show like The fall it’s dark and serious. Jean is a sex therapist and mother to the show’s protagonist, Otis (Asa Butterfield), a precocious but clumsy high school student who is trying to understand love and sex on her terms, while her mother is mortifying about both. Jean Milburn is just as relentlessly urban and captivating as Stella, capable of an exhilarating deadpan performance worthy of Monty Python. But she is more vulnerable and emotional, appropriately, as on Sex education Anderson plays a single mom rather than a serial killer hunter.
Characters like these are the foundation of Anderson’s postFile X image – they are incredibly intelligent, knowledgeable and charismatic. They have strong perspectives on gender roles. And more than anything else, they are fantastic.
Over the past decade, Anderson has proven capable of taking on roles that require not just skillful and nuanced acting, but those ineffable qualities of watchability and charm. It looks like it can do anything.
So what will you do with Margaret Thatcher?
The crown won two Emmys for acting: one for Claire Foy in the role of Queen Elizabeth in the second season and another for Lithgow in the role of Churchill in the first season. Lithgow is a legendary actor and played a legendary figure well, but he hasn’t discovered or revealed anything particularly new about a historical character who has been portrayed on screen more times than anyone can count.
We know Churchill: determined, combative, spherical. An inspirational figure for those who supported him, a racist selfish for those who dig beneath the surface.
In contrast, Thatcher is notable for her absence from popular drama and television films. The obvious exception is The Iron Lady, for which Meryl Streep won an Oscar, but the film itself has incredibly little to say about such an important and provocative historical figure. The Iron Lady it’s a showcase for Streep and the film’s makeup team, but beyond that, all it says about Thatcher is that she existed, was surrounded by men, hated unions, and suffered from dementia in old age.
Thatcher, along with Ronald Reagan, was one of the leading neoconservative figures of the 1980s and the first woman to become head of government in the UK She went to war against Argentina for the Falkland Islands in 1982 and fought just as fiercely against work. -classing people at home. In domestic politics, it promulgated massive deregulation and privatization campaigns, broke strikes and supported regressive tax reforms. As the European Community took its first steps towards the EU it is today, nationalist and Eurosceptic Thatcher laid the rhetorical foundations to leave it.
(In 2013, Eric Andre, on his eponymous talk show, asked former Spice Girl Mel B if Margaret Thatcher had female power. When Mel B said yes, Andre went on to ask her if she thought Thatcher had “actually used the power of girls by funneling money into illegal paramilitary death squads in Northern Ireland? completely encapsulates Thatcher’s polarizing legacy, but gets you almost everything there.)
In his personal life, Anderson supported liberal political causes. Hundreds of ugly parodies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump on contemporary TV testify to the risk that an actor’s contempt for a character could undermine the performance.
But when Yvonne Villarreal del Los Angeles Times Asked Anderson how he found compassion for Thatcher, Anderson pointed out that he’s just playing what The crown screenwriter (and his partner) Peter Morgan wrote. And Morgan was apparently just as interested in Thatcher’s personal life as a political figure.
“I think you have a good sense of all aspects of her in the show, seeing a much more three-dimensional characterization of Thatcher than you might in a political documentary or you might have thought of her historically,” Anderson said.
It would be in line with The crownIt is the portrait of other prime ministers, from Churchill to the socialist Harold Wilson. Since the perspective of the show is that of the royal family and since it is not strictly political history, these prime ministers are seen primarily through their relationship with Queen Elizabeth. We weren’t in Anthony Eden’s pockets during the Suez Crisis in Season 2, and we probably won’t be in Thatcher for the Falklands War, or “The Lady’s Not For Turning” speech in Season 4.
While Anderson’s assignment is to play a three-dimensional Thatcher, that doesn’t rule out the possibility of her going a little off the beaten track. Thatcher’s introduction in the trailer is not just jarring because it kicks things off, but because Anderson’s first image as the Iron Lady is almost Tarkinesque. All the warmth and empathy we are used to seeing from Anderson seems to have dried up, and an imperial (and imperious) character has remained in its place. It’s a jarring first impression, whatever comes next.
Due to Thatcher’s paucity of cultural representations, whatever Anderson brings The crown it has the potential to become that definitive representation, like George C. Scott’s Patton or Daniel Day-Lewis’s Lincoln. He never did The crown he had an actor who could say so much about a character, or a character that so much needs to be said about.
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