Claire Foy: From Royal Saga To Scandi Noir

As the actor swaps the Queen’s stiff upper lip for the vengeful violence of Lisbeth Salander, Paul Flynn reports on how she is dealing with fame

- Paul Flynn

IT IS ONE OF THE most startling career U-turns in the acting canon. Claire Foy has handed over the role of the Queen in The Crown to Olivia Colman, and is clearly throwing herself into act two. Out is stately precision and buttoned-up repression; in is a royal badass – the tattooed, pierced, crop-haired, leather-clad Lisbeth Salander in a new adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl In The Spider’s Web, released this week.

Stringing up villains by their heels, diving headlong into street warfare, Lisbeth is the fittingly aggressive superhero that #MeToo demanded. But as exciting as she is, it’s the woman who plays her that has us all talking. In the two years since Claire arrived as a relative unknown to star in what became one of TV’s most successful series, she has become a major fascination.

Last week, as pictures surfaced of her ex-husband, The History Boys actor Stephen Campbell Moore, moving on with Sophie Cookson, his co-star in upcoming spy thriller Red Joan, Claire appeared on the cover of US Vogue, revealing that she once had so little self-confidence that she believed, ‘I looked shit, I was shit at everything and my life was going to be a disaster.’

That couldn’t be further from truth now. As she steps from the small to big screen, Claire is within touching distance of an Oscar to add to her haul (she already has a Golden Globe and Emmy for The Crown). Her other recent film, First Man, is tipped for success at next year’s ceremony. She stars opposite Ryan Gosling as Janet, wife of Neil Armstrong, in Damien ‘La La Land’ Chazelle’s drama about the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to land a man on the moon.