When The Crown Keeps a Stiff Upper Lip, the Slightest Movement Can Speak Volumes

The Crown has a hell of a stiff upper lip. Peter Morgan’s sumptuous Netflix series has always been, at its heart, about the tension between the public face and the private wants and wounds of the Windsor family. Impassive faces and muted responses are a feature, not a bug, and over the course of the first two Claire Foy-anchored seasons, you can watch Elizabeth slowly build walls around herself and (more importantly) grow comfortable behind those walls. It’s only fitting then that in the show’s second age—Olivia Colman succeeding Foy, Tobias Menzies stepping into Matt Smith’s shoes—those walls are even more firmly in place, not just for Elizabeth, but for most of those in her orbit. (As played by Josh O’Connor, Charles is just beginning to build those walls. That slow progression is as subtly tragic as any story about fabulously wealthy and privileged people can be, as though we’re watching a human being become a face on a coin in real time—but that’s a story for another season.)

Already a series that contrasts the lavish world of the British royal family with the highly controlled, often repressed lives they lead, The Crown increased that tension in its third season. But more importantly, that restrained approach became central to two of the finest moments in its very strong third season, the first occurring at the end of “Aberfan,” the third episode, and the second near the end of “Bubbikins,” its fourth. These two moments encapsulate the great strength of The Crown in microcosm: When one keeps a stiff upper lip, the slightest movement can speak volumes. One is the slow birth of a tear. The other is a swallow.

At this point I should acknowledge that Menzies and Colman are always subtle actors; it’s not an exclusively Windsor thing for them. I should also note, in the interest of full disclosure, that on an Outlander podcast I co-host, a not-small percentage of our total time has been devoted to the miraculous face of Tobias Menzies, who can be absolutely terrifying or heartbreaking just by kind of clenching his jaw a little; we call it “jacting,” as in jaw-acting, but loosely apply the term to tiny things he does with his arms, his forehead, his breath pattern, two fingers, the list goes on. Hand to god, he has made some sort of deal with the devil that allows him to make his eyes move closer together at will; he is a magician. So I was prepared in advance for moments like the swallow at the end of “Bubbikins.” Matt Smith is a very fine performer, but he has not one single moment in either of his two seasons of The Adventures Of Philip, Royal Playboy that compares to that swallow. Nor is that moment the only one of the sort in this season; Menzies’ got at least six in “Moondust,” the Philip-yells-at-Anglican-priests-and-is-disappointed-by-astronauts episode, as well.

But that swallow is really, if you’ll pardon the expression, the tits. (The impulse to be kind of vulgar when writing about The Crown is nearly as strong as the urge to use “one” and the royal we.) “Bubbikins” sees Philip tilting at a public relations windmill, attempting to soften up the image of the family in an effort to both course-correct from a disastrously out-of-touch interview and to make an argument for an increase in pay for the Queen and her family, courtesy of the British people. That effort takes the form of a documentary, and his anxiety around the effort spikes when his mother, Princess Alice of Greece (Jane Lapotaire)—a nun forced to leave her convent after a political uprising—comes to live in Buckingham Palace. She keeps inquiring after “Bubbikins,” and Elizabeth and Anne (the terrific Erin Doherty) keep demurring. Philip sees her speaking to the documentary crew and is mortified, yet even then he doesn’t speak to her, and instead sends others to stop the interview and retrieve the footage; it’s only after Anne slyly directs an anti-monarchist reporter meant to profile her to Alice instead that Philip sees the woman she is, and not the troubled mother he believes abandoned him.

If you want to revisit this scene, it’s at about the 50-minute mark in “Bubbikins.” Philip goes to see her, reads the resulting profile aloud; it’s both upsetting and moving, a recitation of the wrongs done to this woman and her grace in the face of it all. He apologizes for his “faithlessness,” and she replies that it’s he who’s owed the apology. “At least your sisters had something of their mother,” she says, and he swallows. They discuss faith—the way he says his is “dormant” without really releasing his jaw is another damned symphony, someone give the man an Emmy or two—and then she proposes a walk. He swallows again.

In a landscape where everything is manicured, controlled, lit just so and timed just right, such a swallow speaks volumes. It’s equivalent to a person falling to their knees and weeping on another show. And because swallowing isn’t typically a performative action, something we do to indicate our emotions to others, it speaks even louder. We swallow to clear our throats. We swallow sobs the way we blink back tears, but Menzies doesn’t really blink. He just swallows, and it says a million things at once. Such a movement is a microexpression of sorts, an involuntary action designed to conceal, rather than reveal, emotion. I don’t know if Tobias Menzies let loose with those two swallows in each and every take. Perhaps they were planned, or perhaps they were the totally involuntary result of the emotion he summoned for himself in the scene. Whatever the case, they’re minuscule but staggering emotional moments, subtle but incredibly potent. Menzies doesn’t let Philip cry, he doesn’t even let him fight back tears. He just stands there, his face unchanged, and swallows.