The Crown’s research team shares everything you need to know about what’s real (and what’s not) in season 4

What does it take to create one of the most ambitious shows on TV? For Annie Sulzberger and Oona O’Beirn, The Crown’s head of research and the producer who leads the script department, respectively, the process usually begins more than a year before production. Once the season’s time period is settled on, they delve into archives, conduct extensive interviews and write detailed timelines that shape what we ultimately see on screen. But, for the awards-laden Netflix series’s fourth outing—which focuses on the 1980s and features our first glimpse of Emma Corrin as Lady Diana Spencer and Gillian Anderson as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—the stakes were higher than ever.

“It gets harder the closer we come to the present day because people think they know this era really well and they have strong opinions on it,” says O’Beirn. “There may not be a definitive truth, but our job is to pull from both sides and understand those involved.” They’ve succeeded in doing just that over the course of 10 meticulously crafted episodes, which chart Charles and Diana’s tumultuous marriage and estrangement, see Thatcher voted in and ousted from office, and find the Queen questioning her commitment to political neutrality.

While much of the story is grounded in historical fact, some timelines have been tweaked, events amalgamated and sequences invented for dramatic effect. “One of the things that irks us is when articles say we get things wrong,” says Sulzberger. “When we deviate from what happened, those are active choices and the way in which we get to those scenes is so thoroughly researched.”

Even more frustrating, however, is when they stumble upon an incredible anecdote that can’t be inserted into the narrative. “There was an equerry who told us that the Queen enjoyed watching Embarrassing Bodies on Channel 4,” laughs O’Beirn. “As we’re inching forwards, we tell [The Crown’s creator] Peter [Morgan], ‘I’ve got this great story for you!’” adds Sulzberger. “And he’s like, ‘I don’t care about Embarrassing Bodies,’ and you’re like, ‘But why? It’s so good!’”

As the fourth season of the royal hit lands on Netflix on November 15, Sulzberger and O’Beirn join us for a spoiler-filled discussion on its key moments and separate the fact from the fiction.

In season four, we witness the moment Charles and Diana met, while the latter is in costume as a tree from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Do we know how they actually met?

Oona O’Beirn: “[The costume] was a Peter [Morgan] invention, but it came from the research we did on the fact that [Diana] loved dancing and performing as a teenager. We know she and Charles first met when she was 16, when he was dating [her older sister] Sarah [Spencer]. It was at Althorp, the home of the Spencer family. Then, their second meeting, which we have at the Badminton Horse Trials, but which actually happened at [Diana’s friend Philip] de Pass’s estate—she spoke about it herself in [the documentary] Diana: In Her Own Words. She said they sat on a hay bale and she talked to him about [Charles’s father’s uncle] Lord Mountbatten’s funeral and how sorry she felt for him.”

The show also portrays the Queen’s relationship with Margaret Thatcher as rather strained. How much do we really know about what they thought of each other?

Annie Sulzberger: “There’s a substantial amount of work out there and we had some useful interviews with people who were on the outskirts of their spheres. I don’t think anyone could claim that [their relationship] was not frosty.”

OO: “We know a bit about [Thatcher’s] visits to [the Queen’s Scottish estate] Balmoral, and of all the prime ministers who went there, she was in and out very quickly. She loved to work and that sort of holiday didn’t suit her. We heard that she was forced to play parlour games.”

We witness the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979, when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) blew up his fishing boat. Did that play out as we see it on screen?

OO: “Yes, it’s very close to what really happened. We had trouble filming that day because the weather was terrible and it was difficult to get out to sea. We had a few more scenes that didn’t end up in the final cut, which showed two men [from the IRA] in their car with a remote control. The scene felt like something that we couldn’t leave out, because Mountbatten has been such a significant character in the series, especially in terms of his close relationship to Charles.”

In another memorable scene, we see Diana roller-skating around Buckingham Palace while listening to Duran Duran’s Girls on Film. Did that really happen?

OO: “It’s true! [Our research showed that] she also rode her bicycle around [inside the palace] the night before she got married, but we didn’t manage to get that in. It’s hard to do on some of those carpets. I think she probably stuck to less interesting bits of the palace, but we wanted to set it in the bits of the palace we’d already seen. It reminds you that Diana was only 19 at that time.”

There’s also a standalone episode about Buckingham Palace intruder Michael Fagan who broke into the Queen’s bedroom in 1982. Do we know what the two of them actually talked about?

AS: “Michael Fagan has changed his story many times. [We found interviews] in which he said that he wanted [the Queen] to understand what Thatcher’s policies were doing to the average person. He said he’d sought help from the government, but there was none. But the version he gave to the police when he got arrested was that he was too nervous to say anything and just sat there until he was taken away.

“We read through more interviews and tried to piece it together. What kept coming up as the most common thread was: ‘I’m an ordinary chap and I want to tell you what it’s like.’ So, that’s the version we felt comfortable doing.” [Note: Michael Fagan recently told The Daily Telegraph that The Crown “used a lot of artistic licence” because he and the Queen exchanged very few words. He maintains he can’t explain why he broke in, although he was frustrated by joblessness and the break-up of his marriage and he didn’t agree with the Thatcher government’s policies.]

OO: “[Fagan] was able to be a vessel through which to represent a lot of people in this period when unemployment was so high.”

AS: “We owe a lot to Michael Fagan because when we’ve tried to write the general public into the show before, it can feel inorganic or forced because it’s not like [the Queen] would ever have actually interacted with these people. Trying to find that bridge between her world and theirs has always been difficult, but with Fagan literally coming through her door, those worlds [collided].”

Another standalone episode follows Charles and Diana on their tour of Australia in 1983. How much do we know about their relationship at that time?

AS: “It was a turning point in their marriage. There’s lots written about it, including Diana’s own perspective in the Andrew Morton book [Diana: Her True Story—In Her Own Words] that came out in 1992. She was very natural with people and crowds would start shouting for her. [She and Charles] would walk on separate sides of the walkabout and anyone on [Charles’s] side would be audibly disappointed. It was heartbreaking for him. In some ways, they had similar personalities— they both needed encouragement, but they couldn’t give it to each other.”

Episode seven tells the true story of Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, the Queen’s cousins, who had been secretly placed in a hospital for people with learning difficulties in 1941 and then listed in Burke’s Peerage as having died in the 1960s, when in fact they were still alive. Why was this an important story to tell this season?

OO: “It was a very different time and this sort of thing wasn’t unusual, so it was important for me to keep remembering not to be judgmental, but we were all shocked and devastated by it.”

AS: “We had to try to build almost a diagnosis for [the sisters] based on notes that had no meaning in the medical terminology of today. Trying to understand what genetic disorder they had and what kind of attributes come from that was something we worked really closely on with mental health historians. One of the things the doctors said [about them] was that they could only recognise each other. So, if you were a widowed mother [like theirs] in the middle of a war and these two girls needed full-time care, what would be the right environment for them? It was about how we made it sympathetic while acknowledging it was still shocking.”

Towards the end of the season, Charles is shown to be unhappy with Diana’s performance of Uptown Girl at the Royal Opera House in 1985, and then confused by her gift to him of a video of her singing a song from The Phantom of the Opera. How much of this is true?

AS: “[In regards to Uptown Girl] this obviously happened and the most consistent response we’ve heard is that Charles was upset with how Diana [hit the boundaries of] royal propriety. With [The Phantom of the Opera], I think she’d been to see it multiple times and would play the songs in her car. This did actually happen, too, but the singing part is interesting. Diana went to the West End, had the set [to herself] and we know Andrew Lloyd Webber was there, but no one knew exactly what she did because no one’s seen [the video]. We don’t know if she danced, mimed or sang the song. We thought, ‘What would have the most impact for us?’ Emma [Corrin, who plays Diana] has a lovely singing voice so we couldn’t pass up that opportunity. We had wriggle room to be creative with it.”

OO: “When Emma first auditioned, Peter [Morgan] was in the room and mentioned this moment. She was like, ‘That’s my favourite song!’ and she sang it. We were outside and could all hear it. That was the moment when everybody fell in love with Emma. When we filmed that scene, the people in the [London production of The Phantom of the Opera] were so generous. They gave us their set, costumes and the orchestra you see on screen is the real orchestra from Phantom!”

The Crown’s fourth season is on Netflix from November 15, 2020

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