It’s a daily occurrence on the sets of television and movies that problems arise, but one issue behind the scenes of Season 3 of The Crown went through several fixes before production simply gave up.
Town & Country shared the struggle that went on behind the scenes of The Crown in order to turn the brown eyes of Olivia Colman bright blue to match those of Queen Elizabeth and previous star, Claire Foy.
The first proposed solution to the eye color problem seemed like it should work. The crew had colored contact lenses made for the brown-eyed actor, but director Ben Caron said it didn’t work, as it was like Colman “was acting behind a mask.”
“It was as if we had taken all of her acting ability and put it in a safe and locked it away,” Caron said.
Next, production thought they would try to take care of the eye color matter after the fact with CGI in postproduction, but that too didn’t seem to work according to Caron.
“But it didn’t feel like her. CGI-ing her eyes seemed to diminish what she was doing,” the director revealed.
After trying to find a way to make Colman’s eyes blue, production threw in the towel, and decided to just let the Oscar-winning actor stick with her given eye color.
It was decided that while it might be jarring at first to see the queen with brown eyes, people will get used to it, and the show’s staffing director believes that people who notice will soon forget. Casting director Nina Gold explains that it is considered far better to have the naturally brown-eyed Olivia Colman than to have another actor who might have the right colored eyes, sharing that everyone always thought it should be Colman in the role.
Gold added that the quality that Foy brought to the screen was humanity, rather than a similarity to Queen Elizabeth.
“We felt that was exactly the same thing Olivia does. It’s not about looks — it’s about a quality,” Gold said.
Olivia Colman talked about something else she had to get accustomed to when shooting The Crown Season 3, and that was her canine cohorts, the Pembroke Welsh Corgis, reported The Inquisitr . Colman explained that she never thought of herself as a dog person, yet found the dogs to be sweet and quirky.
“I really loved them, but they’re just, in general… the corgis are odd. They love cheese, like cheddar cheese.”
