Gillian Anderson Talks “The Crown” for InStyle Magazine

Gillian Anderson sat down with InStyle editor-in-chief, Laura Brown, to talk all things Hollywood. Following her Golden Globe-nominated turn as Margaret Thatcher in ‘The Crown,’ the irreverent actress and mom opens up on filming the series and all that it entailed.

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On preparing to play Thatcher in The Crown: “I was really f—ing nervous. At the same time, it’s a wonderful production run by adults who have done it before. They shoot the first two weeks of stuff for any big new character on the soundstages. It was comforting to know that if I sucked, it would be easy to reshoot as opposed to renting a countryside mansion for another day because I was bad. I had an intense scene on my first day of work, and I knew that even if I did my absolute best, I’d probably be a bit more in her shoes, her voice, her everything, a few weeks down the road. It made it easier to have that safety net in case I wasn’t quite there at the beginning.”

On the voice of Thatcher: “I was in a relationship with the show-runner [Peter Morgan] at the time, and I saw so much stuff even before the final cut. Sometimes it would be easy to hear it in another room, and sometimes it wouldn’t be. [laughs] I worked very hard on the voice, specifically. It needed to be a particular pitch and way of talking that felt like it would be natural and grounded somewhere in me, and also one that I could keep consistent.”

On the disclaimer at the beginning of The Crown: “It’s so obvious that we’re doing a TV show and that these are characters based on real-life people. To me, it just felt like drama for the sake of drama. But I get that there are a lot of people invested. There’s a lot of stuff that could have been written about — but was not — that is so much worse than what ended up in the show. There has been kindness extended in certain areas where it didn’t have to be.”

The March issue of InStyle, available on newsstands, on Amazon, and for digital download February 12.
[Photo Credit: PHOTO BY Charlotte Hadden/Together Associates]

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