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Entertainment

28th May 2022

Filming for season five of The Crown is ‘shut down’ by the royal family

Trine Jensen-Burke

The Crown

One is not happy, apparently.

The Crown is one of Netflix’s biggest ever success series, and fans across the world are now eagerly awaiting season five of the show, which is due to land on the streaming platform sometime this November.

However, it seems like filming of the popular show, which chronicles the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth and the British royal family from the 1950s and onwards, has had some major setbacks recently – and according to a royal biographer, it’s the royal family themselves who are to blame.

Tina Brown, who has written two books on the royal family, The Diana Chronicles and the upcoming ‌The Palace Papers, has now claimed that the royals are “very unhappy about this season moving forward” and that they have made several attempts to block filming for the upcoming fifth season wherever and whenever possible.

“Whenever they can, they stop The Crown filming in locations where they have an influence,” she told The AV Club.

“For instance, [Eton College] refused to let them film there, which was undoubtedly about recognising William’s feelings that, you know, they weren’t going to have it. So they’ve shown their displeasure by making it quite clear that they are not happy, and we’ll give it no help.”

Season five of The Crown

The fifth and penultimate season of The Crown is currently being filmed in locations across the UK, and as all fans of the show know, is set to dramatise many of the most significant and infamous events in modern royal history, including Prince Charles and Diana’s divorce, and also, of course, Princess Diana’s tragic death in a Paris car crash in 1997.

The last season of the show will see award-winning actress Imelda Staunton replace Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth, while actor Jonathan Pryce will take over the role of Prince Philip from Tobias Menzies.

Speaking about the impact of season 5 on the royals, Brown also predicted that Prince Harry – who admitted during his infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey last year that he has indeed watched The Crown – is going to be particularly uncomfortable with the portrayal of his mother.

“I don’t think that the next season of The Crown is going to be something that Harry is going to seriously approve of in the sense of the way it’s depicts his mothe,” Brown speculated.

“We don’t know how it will depict his mother. But right now, there’s really nothing that’s come out about their mother that they like.”

The Crown season 5 is due to land on Netflix in November.