Don't Call Her Quirky

In The Crown, Helena Bonham Carter plays Princess Margaret in her tabloid-hounded middle age. Some of it seems familiar.

- By Kathryn VanArendonk. Photograph by Louie Banks

HELENA BONHAM CARTER looks the teensiest bit bored. It’s a gray afternoon in England, and we’re in an impeccably neat garden on the set of The Crown. The Netflix series, which illustrates the tensions between the royal family’s private lives and public personae, necessarily involves many sequences full of dull protocol. Her role today: walking down a staircase. (Later she will describe it as a day in which she was essentially a “paid extra.”) When she clocks me from several yards away, Bonham Carter appears momentarily roused. Across the production’s busy membrane of actual extras, cameras, and cables stationed between us, she begins miming energetically, first at herself and then back at me as if to say, Are you the one who’s here for me? Then places are called, and she slips into her role as Princess Margaret, the often scandalous, unhappy younger sister of Queen Elizabeth.

Standing next to Bonham Carter is Olivia Colman in an ice-blue dress that fits her like a suit of armor. In character as the queen, Colman seems to disappear and is replaced by Elizabeth’s implacable steadiness. Bonham Carter also uncannily replicates Margaret’s speech patterns and the minimal way she moves her body through the stultifying royal traditions. She’s wearing an olive-drab look so unremarkable that by all rights it should render her nearly invisible. But there’s a small piece of her that remains Bonham Carter. Her inerasable verve is still glowing, unmistakable in a glancing eye or a particularly sharp tilt of the head.