Earlier this summer, Peter Morgan was sitting in a mall movie theater in Calgary, watching Emma Corrin break bad as the menacing Cassandra Nova in Deadpool & Wolverine when he had a vivid flashback. “I missed half the movie I guess because I was just remembering the day where [Emma] first came in,” the creator of The Crown tells Tudum, referring to Corrin’s audition for the role of Princess Diana in the acclaimed show’s fourth season for which they were ultimately nominated for an Emmy. 

“Emma equipped themselves so well and held their own so well,” Morgan says of Corrin’s on-screen evolution from shy royal to Marvel superstar. “I take no credit for Emma and just how they’ve grown. They would always have made a success of it, but I’m thrilled that we can lay claim to some of it.”

Corrin isn’t the only alumnus enjoying stratospheric success after breaking out on The Crown, nominated for 87 Emmy Awards over the course of its six seasons. Josh O’Connor, who played opposite Corrin as Prince Charles and won an Emmy for his performance, recently broke the internet as a cocky, sweaty tennis star in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers and is currently in production on Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Meanwhile, Vanessa Kirby, who originated the role of Princess Margaret in Seasons 1 and 2, has since starred opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible — Fallout and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, and she recently joined the cast of The Fantastic Four as Sue Storm. In 2020, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her gut-wrenching performance in Pieces of a Woman, and she can soon be seen in the upcoming thriller Night Always Comes. 

Casting director Robert Sterne, who was faced with the Herculean challenge of finding actors with the range and sensitivity to portray real-life characters — and repeating the task every two seasons — credits the show for fostering a supportive environment for up-and-coming talent. “That young actor has to step in there and act opposite some of the leading lights in the UK and go toe to toe with them and have proper wattage. So it’s a big and exciting undertaking for somebody,” he tells Tudum. “We gave lots of different avenues to pursue in order for the actor to feel comfortable about finding their way into creating these people. I think it’s really important to provide an environment that they can be creative in.” 

Ahead, Morgan and Sterne share some of their memories of Corrin, O’Connor, and Kirby on the set of The Crown and offer a glimpse into the magic behind their performances. 

Des Willie/Netflix

Josh O’Connor

What qualities were you looking for in an actor to portray Prince Charles at this point in his life?

Robert Sterne: We went completely full circle with Josh. The first time that we read [the script], we thought, “It’s got to be Josh O’Connor.” He looks perfect for it, and he’s a bloody good actor. He’s so watchable, he’s so detailed in his work, he’s got a humanity about him. He had to go a long journey from being more vulnerable to, at the end, [having] problems with his marriage. He was our guy. But at the time when we were looking he wasn’t around. So, we had to go off and we went on a big old journey, we saw lots of other people, and then I remember going towards the end of that process just thinking, “We’ve got to have another go with Josh.” So we called him up and we sent him some scenes. There was a scene that had been written when he goes on a date with Camilla, and they have a dinner together and he refers to this book he’s reading called The Dangling Man, and he realizes that he’s waiting to be the person that he’s destined to be. But in order for that to happen, somebody else has to die. Josh read that scene, and he clicked. 

What stood out to you about him? What was his star quality?

Sterne: You feel his vulnerabilities and you feel his pain. He’s a really, really excellent, detailed artist. 

Peter Morgan: Josh has a delicacy. [The Prince of Wales] wasn’t one of those royal family members that you felt was born to be in the army, born to be a serviceman. He was a creative soul, and an imaginative soul, and none of that is necessarily best suited to the traditional upbringing that someone like Prince Philip thrived in. And so Josh needed to have some of, on the one hand a confidence, the articulacy and the intelligence, but on the other hand a sensitivity and a vulnerability and a complexity.

Have you seen Challengers?

Morgan: Of course.

What did you think?

Morgan: I thought, “God bless him, and God bless Luca Guadagnino.” And I thought it was spectacular, to be honest. He’s just a sex god.

Des Willie/Netflix

Emma Corrin

What qualities were you looking for in an actor to portray Diana at this point in her life?

Morgan: Finding a young Diana is really complicated, and it weighed on me. I was prepared to write the show without casting Diana because I think casting the wrong Diana is so harmful. If you don’t believe Diana, the whole show loses its credibility — and Diana’s probably the hardest person to cast, certainly after the queen. I honestly think we found — I really mean this because God knows we looked and we tried — these two perfect actors in Emma Corrin and Elizabeth Debicki, because it was a miracle enough to find Emma, but then also to find Elizabeth afterwards. Wow. So grateful.

What was Emma’s audition like? Do you remember what scene they read?

Morgan: Robert had got them to come in and read while we were auditioning Emerald Fennell [for the role of Camilla Parker Bowles]. Emerald  had read about three words and I thought, “OK, she’s got the part. Now, who’s this?”

What stood out to you about Emma? What was their star quality?

Sterne: When they came in for The Crown, we set one scene after another and one challenge after another just to see, because it seemed like an exciting place to be going, and Emma just rose to the challenge every time. Do you remember when you got her singing Andrew Lloyd Webber, Peter? You told the story of how Diana had videoed herself singing “All I Ask of You” from Phantom of the Opera, and you said to Emma, “Do you sing?” And Emma said, “Yeah.” And then you said, “Do you know that song?” And Emma said, “Yeah.” And then you said, “Do you want to do it now?”

Morgan: Oh, my God. They did it in the audition, of course.

Sterne: They were blushing — it was incredibly sweet.

Morgan: But they were also kind of fearless. It’s incredibly moving.

Did Emma have a chemistry read with Josh O’Connor?

Sterne: I think that the chemistry read between them came pretty late in the day. Josh was filming, so we went out to a location. So Emma suddenly found themselves in a big stately home somewhere, and we did a reading on one of the sets there. We read a scene together, and it was just exactly as you hoped it to be. Josh is a really brilliant and generous actor anyway to everybody he works with, and we immediately just saw that relationship in front of our eyes and thought, “There we are.” It was great.

Robert Viglasky/Netflix

Vanessa Kirby

What qualities were you looking for in an actor to portray Margaret at this point in her life?

Morgan: Everybody really wanted us to go with one particular actor for the role, and I wasn’t 100% convinced by the person that everybody had coalesced around. The way I wrote about Princess Margaret was that there was an unpredictable, wild element. When I met Vanessa, she was much taller than Princess Margaret was, and therefore not necessarily a particularly close physical likeness. But her presence … 

Sterne: Vanessa Kirby lights up a room when she comes in. There was something about the vivacity of her, along with the vulnerability underneath. And you know that this sibling relationship is going to have its tensions, as well as its support. Princess Margaret had a very famous, iconic life and we were thinking about that [while casting].

What was her audition like? 

Morgan: Well, it was catastrophic. It was her birthday and she had put fake tanner on. But being new, she’d done it catastrophically, and it was dripping all the way down her shins, and the inside of her palms were deeply brown and everything else was blotchy. And she walked into walls and this and that. But there was something about her, you couldn’t take your eyes off anything that she was doing, including the catastrophes.

What stood out to you about her? What was her star quality?

Morgan: Sometimes you can’t tell whether someone’s going to pop on-screen in the way that they pop in a room. But she’s every bit as good in front of the camera as she is off the camera. And I think she’s going to go on and have a spectacular long career. Same with Josh O’Connor and Claire Foy, of course — these are all people who you’re watching and you’re thinking, “God willing, I’ll live long enough to see enough of their work.”

Stream all six seasons of The Crown now, only on Netflix.