The Crown writer Peter Morgan says he found Buckingham Palace ‘crazier’ than fiction when he went to receive his CBE
Peter Morgan, the creator and writer of The Crown, remembers going to Buckingham Palace to receive a CBE for services to drama – saying it was ‘even crazier’ than fiction.
Speaking in California ahead of the launch of the show’s sixth and final series on Netflix, he said the costumes and protocol seemed bizarre and otherworldly.
Morgan, whose father was a German Jew who fled the Nazis for Britain, said: ‘I had to go to the palace for an occasion and when I went there I thought, I don’t understand this at all.
‘It seems even crazier than what we do! And there were grown men with spurs and everyone had a funny costume on and they bowed.
Stars: Peter Morgan and Elizabeth Debicki attend the Los Angeles premiere of Netflix’s The Crown Season 6 Part 1 on November 12
Royal: Screenwriter Morgan is appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire
“They cheat you on the protocol and you walk in and you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re paralyzed.”
Morgan received the honor from King Charles and later recalled that Charles had said to him, “Scriptwriting isn’t that easy, is it?” He added, “I tend to think that the most important thing is not what you leave in, but what you leave out.”
At the time, Morgan had written The Deal about the Brown Blair Pact and also The Queen, starring Helen Mirren and focusing on the days immediately following Princess Diana’s death.
This series of The Crown includes the death of the Princess and ends with Charles’ marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles.
Morgan said, “The joy and the thing I’m already missing is writing about a multi-generational family. It’s the best thing for a writer to write about because it ties us all together, and the shared human experience and the challenges of living within a family and how the different generations of a family interact.
‘Crazy’: Morgan said: ‘I had to go to the Palace for an event and when I went there I thought, ‘I don’t understand this at all’
‘I am very grateful to them because it has given me a fantastic opportunity to write about a family in unique and interesting circumstances.’
He concluded: ‘The current queen, I think, looked a bit – if you look historically – a bit like Wallis Simpson, and I think Charles took the role extremely well. He seems like a very confident, relaxed king and she now seems like a very confident, relaxed queen – and he hasn’t put a step wrong. That doesn’t mean that times weren’t difficult, but because of the strength of the feeling that was there for Diana and the sense of injustice.
“It was an equal opportunity that suffered because he was denied the woman he almost married. Over time, opinions softened and changed and respect was earned. And they now, I should say, in Britain. She’s a very popular queen, I think.’