Netflix released the first Season 3 teaser for The Crown, and let’s just say that all the fuss about the streaming giant’s decision not to use CGI (or blue contact lenses) to transform Olivia Colman’s brown eyes was a bit overwrought. It certainly doesn’t matter that Colman’s peepers don’t match the icy blue of predecessor Claire Foy’s eyes (and those of the real-life Queen Elizabeth II) because her “let’s get on with it” manner of performance sells things.
It’s quite fitting, then, that Colman’s incarnation of The Queen spends this teaser surveying the public reception of her new profile. She’s older now, of course, given that this season leaps ahead from the monarch’s young-adult days to 1964. And she takes a no nonsense approach (calling herself an “old bat”) to the passage of time, just like every other issue that slides her way. Colman certainly sounds like just Foy did during the show’s first two seasons, and we darn well know that the Oscar winner’s taking this seriously. She previously joked that she nabbed “the worst job in the world” because “everyone loves Claire Foy.”
Given the very nature of a teaser, we don’t see much here. No Helena Bonham Carter picking up where Vanessa Kirby’s exquisitely rage-filled performance left off as Princess Margaret. No Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street. And no peek at Tobias Menzies taking over for Matt Smith as the Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh.
We’ll likely see more of them in an upcoming trailer, and certainly, when The Crown season 3 streams on November 17.
