Showrunner Peter Morgan has lifted the lid a little on The Crown season 3. Speaking at a BAFTA Masterclass event earlier this week, Morgan revealed a number of intriguing snippets about the upcoming third run of Netflix’s regal drama.
For one thing, Morgan explained that he is looking at “establish actors” to star alongside Olivia Colman’s Queen Elizabeth as the new version of Prince Philip. He didn’t name any names, though, and early favourite Paul Bettany is said to have dropped out of the running. Whoever ends up playing the role, it will be interesting to see how the new Lilibet and Philip compare – especially in terms of chemistry – to the outgoing iterations portrayed by Claire Foy and Matt Smith.
Regarding his ongoing script development, Morgan said this about his work so far on The Crown season 3’s story: “These scripts [for the first two seasons] were all about 50-60 pages, and I think they were sometimes too busy and I think that they sometimes had too much going on, they were too indigestible. I’d like to strip them down [in future]. It shouldn’t all just be yadda yadda yadda.”
Also, in terms of an eventual final end for the show, Morgan admits that he hasn’t got that far in his planning. The idea is for The Crown to run for six seasons, with three different casts playing the central roles (each cast gets two seasons apiece). But at the moment, Morgan “can’t think beyond the two seasons [the third and the fourth] that we’re doing at the moment”.
We’ll bring you more The Crown season 3 news as we hear it. As it stands, the show’s return date has not been set.