Helena Bonham Carter: ‘The Crown’ Has a Responsibility to Be Labeled Fiction
Fact vs. fiction. Helena Bonham Carter, who portrayed Princess Margaret for two seasons of The Crown, shared in a new interview that she believes the Netflix show should remind viewers that it is not a documentary.
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“It is dramatized. I do feel very strongly, because I think we have a moral responsibility to say, ‘Hang on, guys, this is not … it’s not a drama-doc, we’re making a drama,’” the actress, 54, said on “The Crown: The Official Podcast” on the Monday, November 30, episode. “So, they are two different entities.”
She went on to add that the “proper documentary” is the “amazing” research the show’s creator, Peter Morgan, does ahead of time. After doing that, “then Peter switches things up and juggles,” she said.
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Season 4 of the show, which chronicles Prince Charles‘ messy relationship with Princess Diana, has caused an uproar due to the negative portrayal of the royal family and the way things were run. British politician Oliver Dowden recently also urged the streaming service to start with a disclaimer.
“It’s a beautifully produced work of fiction, so as with other TV productions, Netflix should be very clear at the beginning it is just that,” he told the Daily Mail on Saturday, November 28. “Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.”
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Diana’s younger brother Earl Charles Spencer also spoke out about the show’s inaccuracies.
“The Crown asked if they could film at Althorp, and I said, ‘Obviously not,’” he recalled on a recent episode of Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh. “The worry for me is that people see a program like that, and they forget that it is fiction. They assume, especially foreigners, I find Americans tell me they have watched The Crown as if they have taken a history lesson. Well, they haven’t. It is very hard, there is a lot of conjecture and a lot of invention, isn’t there? You can hang it on fact, but the bits in between are not fact.”
Morgan, 57, told The Times on November 20 that the streaming service has never advertised the show as a documentary.
“We do our very, very best to get it right, but sometimes I have to conflate [events],” the screenwriter said at the time. “You sometimes have to forsake accuracy, but you must never forsake truth.”
Us Weekly has reached out to Netflix for comment.
