The Crown‘s Claire Foy has a lot to say about the unfair rules that are imposed on women in even today’s modern society.
The actress who portrays Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom on Netflix for instance refuses to judge the real life monarch on sometimes choosing her duty over spending time with her children when they were young. “I’ve learned that the last thing you can do is judge another mother. She had a job to do, and if she was a man, no one would have questioned it,” Foy says.
She of course can relate, being a working woman herself who sometimes have to choose her career over quality time with her child. For The Crown, she had to go work on the series five months after she gave birth to her daughter. And she did feel guilty on having to work when she had a newborn baby at home.
“As a mother, you’re told what you should do and how you should behave,” she explains. “You’re pretty much damned any way you look at it. Having a job and doing what you love is not something that women have been told is all right. Oh my God, it’s amazing how hard we are on ourselves, all the time, about everything.”
She also has a problem with the way young ladies are expected to behave, especially since she herself admits that as young teenager she was an “angry person on some level” for some reason that she does not know. And she had to suppress that side of her because of what is expected and not be herself.
“You’re told aren’t you? You’re told as a young woman what’s attractive, what’s acceptable, what’s the right or wrong way to be,” Foy says, but then she found an outlet in acting. “I’m lucky I discovered acting as a way of expressing myself, but unless you’re given the permission to do that, you can’t get it out. So with my child, I’m like: ‘Run around! Scream! Shout! Go on!’ I wish there was a way of saying to girls: ‘You don’t have to be polite and pretty in order to survive and have people love you.’ The idea that you should be like everybody else genuinely breaks my heart. And I’m going to have to do something about it.”
And she thinks expectations are there to keep women in check. “And the rule is only there to try and control us, because everyone’s terrified of what we’re capable of. If all the women in the world suddenly went: ‘I’ve just realised I can’t be arsed with this any more,’ then everyone would run for the hills!”
Well, she may only play a Queen, but with words like that she can be one.
The entire second season of The Crown will be available worldwide on Netflix on December 8.
