The Crown has wowed audiences for the best part of a decade, with its intimate and at times sensational depiction of trails and tribulations in the world’s most famous royal family. As a show that is set across a period of several decades, however, it has seen entire casts come and go. So what has happened to the cast who appeared in the first season back in 2016? Here’s the skinny.
Claire Foy
Foy won two Emmy Awards for her work as Queen Elizabeth II. Since then, Foy has been selective in her choice of roles, largely restricting herself to film work: she gained Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for her appearance as Neil Armstrong’s first wife Janet in First Man (2019), and received positive reviews for The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain (2021).
Matt Smith
Principally known prior to his appearance in The Crown as the Eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who, Smith’s career has gone from strength to strength since appearing as Prince Philip. This year, he starred as Daemon Targaryen in HBO’s House of the Dragon. Big screen roles in recent years have mostly been in genre films, including several horror flicks, and 2022’s Morbius, in which Smith starred opposite Jared Leto.
Vanessa Kirby
Kirby’s appearance in The Crown as Princess Margaret is widely considered to be her breakout moment. Several high-profile Hollywood roles have come her way in recent years, including excellent work opposite Joaquin Phoenix as Joséphine in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon; however, her Academy Award-nominated turn in Pieces of a Woman (2020) takes some beating.
Eileen Atkins
The Emmy Award-winning Dame Eileen Atkins played the aging matriarch of the Royal Family, Queen Mary. Now in her late eighties, Atkins continues to perform on stage and screen, with well-received appearances in the long-running ITV medical drama Doc Martin in recent years. In 2019 she received an Olivier Award nomination – her eighth – for her work in Florian Zeller’s Broadway play, The Height of the Storm.
Jeremy Northam
Appearing as the Prime Minister who presided over the infamous Suez Crisis, Anthony Eden, Jeremy Northam has done little TV and film work since The Crown. However, he is set to return to prominence with a supporting role in Freud’s Last Session, also starring two-time Academy Award winner Anthony Hopkins; the film debuted last month to positive reviews.
Victoria Hamilton
Hamilton played Elizabeth, the mother of Queen Elizabeth II, in The Crown’s first season. Since then, she has worked steadily in film and TV, with starring roles in the second season of Fox’s espionage drama series Deep State; in Life, a BBC drama debuting in 2020; and opposite Robert Carlyle in Sky One’s political thriller COBRA.
Ben Miles
Miles, who played George VI’s equerry Peter Townsend, has appeared extensively on TV since The Crown, most notably in the BBC’s thriller series The Capture, which debuted in 2019. Star Wars fans will also recognize him as Tay Kolma in Andor. Like Vanessa Kirby, Miles also appears in Napoleon, in a supporting role.
Greg Wise
The star of the 1995 flagship BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility has had a quiet few years since appearing as Lord Mountbatten. He appeared in a supporting role opposite Rosamund Pike and Tom Hollander in the critically acclaimed biopic of war journalist Marie Colvin, A Private War (2018), and in the 2019 comedy drama Military Wives.
Jared Harris
A well-established character actor even before his appearance as King George VI, Harris’s star has risen at speed since. His work as a whistleblowing Soviet nuclear physicist in HBO’s 2019 miniseries Chernobyl garnered widespread critical praise, as well as Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, and a BAFTA win for Best Actor.
John Lithgow
Lithgow turned in an Emmy-winning performance as Winston Churchill in season 1 of The Crown, returning at intervals over the next two seasons. His work since has mostly been in film, with an appearance in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) as a prosecutor being the pick of the bunch.
Alex Jennings
A three-time Olivier Award winner, Alex Jennings is arguably better known as a stage actor than a screen actor; however, playing the Duke of Windsor in season 1 of The Crown raised his profile considerably. Recent film appearances have included work opposite Rachel Weisz and Tom Wilkinson in the legal drama Denial (2016); as King Leopold in the ITV/PBS production Victoria (2016-19); and as Sir Horace Wilson in Netflix’s critically acclaimed Munich – The Edge of War (2022).