‘The Crown’s Compelling Trailer Pits the Queen Against Thatcher (VIDEO)

Meaghan Darwish October 29, 2020, 10:00 am

Ready your stiff upper lip — a new trailer for the The Crown‘s upcoming fourth season is here. In the preview, we catch a glimpse of the legendary fraught relationship between Britain’s ruling monarch Queen Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman) and its first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson).

The trailer, released Thursday, October 29, gives viewers a dramatized glimpse of their first meeting, where Britain’s elected official holds nothing back.

“You’re majesty, I think we have enough respect for one another personally to ask ourselves some of the bigger questions, woman to woman,” Anderson’s Thatcher says.

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“We are the same age after all. Really, just six months between us,” she continues in what seems to be a power move to even the playing field. When the Queen innocently asks which one of them is older, Thatcher takes the opportunity to say she is, making her the “senior” in their relationship.

Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies), in his quietly undermining way, later notes, “Two women running the shop? That’s the last thing this country needs.” The Queen, however, is ready: “Perhaps that’s precisely what this country needs,” she counters.

Gillian Anderson The Crown Margaret Thatcher

(Credit: Netflix)

Crown creator Peter Morgan, in a press release accompanying the trailer, elaborated on the two women’s relationship: “It was a commonly held piece of wisdom that the Queen and Thatcher didn’t get on. I think there was probably a lot of respect.”

He also said he got the “chance to explore them both as mothers. Writing Thatcher and the Queen as mothers was probably an angle that no one has explored before. It yielded one of my favorite episodes in the season.”