The Crown’s Bertie Carvel on Tony Blair portrayal: ‘He represents modernity’

Carvel and Queen Elizabeth star Imelda Staunton spoke exclusively with RadioTimes.com about the show’s final season.

By James Hibbs

Published: Friday, 15 December 2023 at 12:15 PM

The final season of The Crown is now available in full on Netflix, and while the show may not be as politically focused as it was in some of its earlier runs, season 6 part 2 does show us more than ever before of Tony Blair‘s time in office.

Blair is played by Bertie Carvel, who spoke exclusively with RadioTimes.com about how the show tackled the Labour Prime Minister’s arc and how it represents him.

“This season is not, as I might have hoped, a biopic of Blair’s time in office,” Carvel explained. “You get snapshots. Episode 6 is very Blair focused. I think it’s a really interesting microcosm of the Blair years, but it doesn’t try to cover everything.

“And much as I was standing ready to do my episode on the Good Friday Agreement and my episode on the Iraq War and my episode on whatever it might have been, Peter touches those things with quite a light brush, I think, and focuses on private conversations really.

“I really enjoyed that I get to do quite a lot of public Blair stuff in episode 6, but then it’s also always brought back to those audience room scenes which are highly private, confidential and entirely imagined by Peter, because constitutionally we’re never meant to know what happens in that closed room, which is really the premise on which the whole series is hung.”

Bertie Carvel as Tony Blair in The Crown season 6
Bertie Carvel as Tony Blair in The Crown season 6.
Netflix

Carvel continued: “I suppose if I had to summarise it, Blair represents modernity. He’s a moderniser, a radical, and to some extent the Queen represents tradition, continuity and so on. And there’s a struggle in her own self in episode 6 – she herself is prepared to be a moderniser and she wants to take a leaf out of Blair’s book.

“She commissions polls and studies and focus groups and has her own family balking at the very idea, because she’s prepared to look at the institution of monarchy; unflatteringly, if necessary. And then the conversations with Blair, she takes the role of a kind of continuity candidate, and argues out whether or not the monarchy should change.

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“And whereas Blair is the arch moderniser and the radical, he’s also one who, I think, has some sympathy with the institution of monarchy. He’s not some sort of kind of bull in a china shop coming in trying to wreck the institution – he’s trying to steer his monarch and give her good advice.

“So they’re both playing both roles. And it’s interesting, I guess Peter uses it to have a debate about what the monarchy should be, and hopefully the audience will make up their own minds.”

Meanwhile, Imelda Staunton, who plays Queen Elizabeth, told RadioTimes.com that she “loves” the contrast between the Queen and Blair, adding that in their meetings on the show she “used to always think of it as like she felt there was a teenager in the room, and not one that was particularly well behaved”.

She continued: “So that was my little sort of trick in my head, about her attitude to him. And dramatically it was wonderful to see her having to adjust to the new person in the chair opposite, and the fact that he just wanted to come in and blow everything out of the water. And she had to just sort of go, ‘just calm down, calm down’.

“And I like the way she would call things out if she didn’t agree, whether it’s about Iraq or whatever, that she didn’t just sit and go, ‘Oh, well, he’s trying to make a lot of noise, I’ll just have to sit back and listen to this’.

“But she also recognised that the world is changing and that it does have to move forward. Things must change, but not everything has to change at once. I think that’s the stance that she took.”