Olivia Colman secretly listened to the shipping forecast while filming emotional scenes in ‘The Crown’.
The 44-year-old actress has taken on the role of Queen Elizabeth in the third series of the Netflix drama and admitted she had to come up with a "shameful" way of stopping herself from crying while shooting scenes of tragedy, such as Winston Churchill’s funeral or her visit to Wales after the 1966 Aberfan disaster, which killed 116 children and 28 adults, even though it meant she couldn’t hear her co-stars lines.
She told Vanity Fair magazine: "My problem is, I emote. The Queen is not meant to do it. She’s got to be a rock for everyone, and [has] been trained not to. We’ve discovered that I can’t do it. But I’ve come up with a little trick. It’s sort of shameful.
"Whenever anyone is telling me something sad, which just makes me cry, they give me an earpiece and they play the shipping forecast.
"It’s somebody going, ‘And the winds are fair to midland . . . blah, blah.’.
"I’m sort of not listening to what [the other actors are] saying. I’m trying so hard to tune into the shipping forecast and not cry."
Olivia feels "very lucky" to have forged a strong relationship with her co-star Helena Bonham-Carter – who portrays her on-screen sister Princess Margaret – and revealed the ‘Fight Club’ actress sent her video tutorials when she needed help in replicating the monarch’s fluency in French on a 1972 state visit to France
She said: "I’m all right with French from school, but her accent is impeccable. So I asked her to record [my dialogue.
"She took the job so seriously. She did it so I could see her face, and then I got some voice recordings as well, where she would start from the beginning. If it was a tricky word, she’d say it again, nice and slowly, like she was the voice department.
"She’s so warm and so sort of embracing of everything, and she’s lovely. I’m really very lucky to spend my days with her."
Olivia Colman’s shipping secret
