“The Crown” alum Helena Bonham Carter says she doesn’t think the Netflix series “should carry on” now that it has nearly caught up to the present day.
“I should be careful here too, but I don’t think they should carry on, actually,” said the actor in a recent interview with The Guardian.
“I’m in it and I loved my episodes, but it’s very different now. When ‘The Crown’ started it was a historic drama, and now it’s crashed into the present. But that’s up to them.”
Bonham Carter portrayed Queen Elizabeth II’s sister Princess Margaret in Season 3 and Season 4 of the Netflix drama, taking over the role from Vanessa Kirby. She passed the baton to Lesley Manville for Season 5, which premiered last fall. Season 6, also starring Manville, is forthcoming.
The sixth and supposedly final season does not yet have a release date, but it will cover the late 1990s to the early 2000s, including Princess Diana’s death.
In 2021, Bonham Carter was one of several voices calling on the show to add a disclaimer stressing that it is a work of historical fiction.
“It is dramatised. 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.’ So they are two different entities,” she said on an episode of the show’s official podcast, per The Guardian.
She praised writer-creator Peter Morgan’s “amazing” research while pointing out that he “switches things up and juggles” for show.
Former U.K. culture secretary Oliver Dowden requested a “warning” for new seasons in 2020, while Dame Judi Dench said in 2022 that “the closer the drama comes to our present times, the more freely it seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism.”
Following Queen Elizabeth II’s death in Sept. 2022, Netflix appeased critics by adding a “fiction dramatization” disclaimer to the Season 5 trailer.
