Matt Smith Returns to television as Prince Philip in Netflix's The Crown - Vogue.com

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The actor in a Ralph Lauren blazer and trousers and an Orley polo.

Photographed by means of Ronan McKenzie, Vogue, November 2016

fresh off the London stage, Matt Smith returns to the small screen as Prince Philip in Netflix's lush new collection The Crown.
wearing floppy navy sweatpants, sweatshirt, sneakers, big headphones, and a back-to-front baseball cap, the British actor Matt Smith, 33, strolls incognito into Colbert, a French brasserie in London's Sloane square. Damp from the downpour outside, he is relaxed and smiling however that he's as a result of go onstage in round an hour at the Royal court docket Theatre round the corner, starring as an egomaniacal movie director in Anthony Neilson's improvised comedy Unreachable.
Having began his career as probably the most enjoyable stage actors of his era—he shone within the background Boys on the countrywide Theatre and as Patrick Bateman within the London production of yank Psycho—Smith has develop into anything of a country wide treasure in Britain, chiefly because enjoying the long-lasting doctor Who from 2010 to 2014. nowadays, sitting in a corner banquette, he attracts greater than his fair proportion of longing appears from the swishy-haired, Sloaney girls having tea on the neighboring tables. (Sorry, he's taken—his female friend is the actress Lily James, with whom he starred in pride and Prejudice and Zombies.)
Raised in the English countryside, Smith is the son of a businessman father and a mother who "did 1,000,000 different jobs." an excellent footballer, he become all set to go knowledgeable however, at sixteen, had to stop on account of a back harm. At a schoolteacher's recommendation, he joined a construction of Twelve angry men. "He turned into convinced I can be an actor," Smith says. "i thought appearing became a bit silly, but I did that play, and i unexpectedly felt fairly passionate about it." He joined the national formative years Theatre and went on to study inventive writing and drama on the school of East Anglia.
Charming, affable, and clever, Smith become a simple fit for his latest function: the younger, glamorous Prince Philip in Netflix's new display The Crown. Created with the aid of Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Queen) and codirected by Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours), The Crown also stars Claire Foy because the younger Elizabeth, Jared Harris in a standout efficiency as King George VI, John Lithgow as Winston Churchill, and Eileen Atkins as Queen Mary. "The moment I noticed Matt within the room, lanky and bad and confident and a little wild, i assumed he turned into our Philip," says Morgan.
For anyone suffering costume-drama withdrawal after the conclusion of Downton Abbey, this collection offers castles and palaces, twinsets and tweeds, and sailor-suitable children galore. Underplayed and understated, and shot in gloomy English mild as if beneath a veil of postwar austerity, The Crown feels like an authentic representation of royal existence. "When Elizabeth became queen, the dynamic between her and Philip shifted. I suppose they both struggled," says Foy. "Smith by some means makes Philip conflicted, loving, charming, strong, and interesting . . . and he appears really first rate in a blond wig!"
The show opens in 1947, simply 5 years before Princess Elizabeth becomes queen. We watch as Philip offers up his birthright (he turned into born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark) for his Duke of Edinburgh title. "He turned into a young man who had a very good career in the making, and all that turned into stripped far from him," observes Smith, who read biographies, watched archive film, and listened to recordings to are trying to catch that very certain "royal" accent. "I didn't are looking to do a cartoon." On set, fiction did every so often tip over into truth. He and Foy would "snort at the absurdity of it," he says, "because you stand there and americans beginning to deal with you like the prince and princess. We'd hear the crew announcing, 'Philip and the queen have arrived.'"
Sittings Editor: Garth SpencerHair: Alexander Soltermann; make-up: Megumi MatsunoProduced by Calum Walsh at Rosco ProductionPhotographed at Dalston Heights, London