The Crown’s Bertie Carvel ‘hated’ filming Tony Blair coronation

Bertie Carvel speaks to Yahoo UK about making a grand entrance in The Crown with a scene that shows Tony Blair being crowned king.

Video transcript

ROXY SIMONS: The opening scene with your character, which is his coronation, which was a very interesting, very bold way to start and introduce him. I wondered, what was that scene like to film? And what did you make of that being the way to bring him into the series?

BERTIE CARVEL: I loved reading it, and I hated shooting it. I think it's a brilliant-- I think it's brilliant and kind of hilarious gesture because it-- of course, it's the Queen's nightmare in the series. And so that gives us license to really push the envelope in terms of-- [LAUGHS] it's sort of stylistically bold. And I love the theatricality of it. But I really found it tricky to shoot because an actor's greatest fear is to be found out, not to be who they say they are, which is crazy because none of us are.

But when you're doing something that is sort of deliberately not real, it can feel quite-- it's one thing doing that on stage, but somehow surrounded by-- there are so many-- there are so many opportunities to kind of feel like an imposter on a film set. Because the amount of time that you're doing the work that people see is tiny next to all the setup and all the retakes and somebody diving in to change the background, and whatever it is.

So the opportunities for distraction are enormous. And all you really have to cling on to is your preparation and your character, whatever that has turned out to be. But if that is someone else's dream [LAUGHS] that I'd spent all this time preparing to persuade myself that I could hold my head high as Mr. Blair, but now I'm playing someone's dream of Blair, which is like another level of kind of-- it's very meta.

So I really hate it. And people kept coming up to me and saying like, oh, you must be having so much fun. It looks like so much fun. And I was just-- through gritted teeth, I'd be like, yeah, it's great. And wearing a crown that will fall off any second, I mean, I have great sympathy with His Majesty. Because watching his coronation, I thought, well, I know how that feels now. You've got to this wobbly great object on your head.

You're just thinking any second now I'm going to trip and fall over my ermine train, and the crown's going to brain the person next to me. And you know-- [LAUGHS] anyway, but it was fun to look back on.