This weekend, Dame Penelope Wilton becomes the latest actress to portray Queen Elizabeth II onscreen in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Although the film is fantasy, Wilton felt it necessary to approach the role seriously—and on a recent phone call, the actress explained why.
“If I played a fantasy queen in a fantasy film, they would cancel each other out and there would be no humor,” Wilton explained. “You have to play the actual Queen, and sort of prick the British reserve to make it funny.”
Having grown up in England, Wilton was well-acquainted with the monarch’s public image. But since Wilton was tapped to play the Queen behind Buckingham Palace’s closed doors—where she entertains a young girl (Ruby Barnhill) and the film’s titular Big Friendly Giant (Mark Rylance)—the six-time Olivier-nominated actress dug through video archives to find evidence of the ruler at home and at ease—or as much at ease as a woman who has reigned over the U.K. for 64 years is capable of being.
“There have been a couple of films made of her with her grandchildren, her on holiday in Scotland, and those kinds of things,” Wilton said. “So I looked at those to see how she interacted with children . . . she is very straightforward and matter-of-fact. She doesn’t patronize children. She talks to them as if they are grown-ups, really.
“She was putting [her grandchildren] on ponies and things, and she has a very good interaction with children because she listens to them,” continued Wilton. “I think that’s why the Queen that Roald Dahl wrote has a very good relationship with Sophie, the little girl, because the Queen listens to what she says and believes her.”
In addition to studying tape of the Queen, Wilton said that she was able to better understand the monarch after putting on her Queen Elizabeth costume—which was accessorized by gloves, a purse, and shoes that costume designer Joanna Johnston had made “by royal appointment,” meaning that they were manufactured by the same designers who make the Queen’s actual accessories.
“They were beautifully handmade,” Wilton said of the clothes. “They were in very bright colors—a wonderful vermillion, blue, or turquoise—because the Queen goes to a lot of enormous events. She is not a tall woman, but everyone, when they go to these events, wants to see the Queen. And if she is wearing bright colors, even if she is a little dot on the horizon, people will come away having seen the Queen.
“If you think about it, all of her clothes are made for practicalities—like her shoes are a certain height. If you are standing for a very, very long time—she can’t stand, even when she was young, in a high stiletto, because her feet would be in agony. You have to have a bag that has a good strong clip in it so it doesn’t fall open. You’ve got to have a hat that won’t make your hair look frightful when you take your hat off. Her clothes are quite conservative because she meets people from all sorts of walks of life and religions. All of these things have to be thought through, because that’s what you have to do when you are on show all the time.”
Wilton ascended her screen throne while filming the final season of Downton Abbey, after asking the series’s producers to fudge the schedule so that her character, Isobel, could be absent long enough for Wilton to film The BFG. Now that the Julian Fellowes-created period drama is finished, with its finale airing this past March in the U.S., there is talk of a Downton Abbey feature film—and Wilton is definitely interested in that spinoff.
“There might be a film coming up next year,” Wilton said. “It’ll be very interesting to see what period it goes into. I think it will be 1926, and they can’t go too far forward because then my character would be dead. So I think it would be 1926, which would be the year of the general strike in England. There was a lot of unrest, so that will be a very interesting period.”
If it does happen, Wilton has a request for Fellowes. For six seasons, viewers watched Isobel and Maggie Smith’s sharp-tongued Dowager Countess trade insults in verbal-sparring matches—only Smith always got the best burns. When we pointed this out as a complaint, Wilton said, “I couldn’t agree more! I would have liked a few more put downs myself.” Laughing, she added, “But sometimes he allowed me a very withering look.”
Wilton still makes a point of seeing some of her co-stars, including Jim Carter, Phyllis Logan, and Smith—her real-life friend, with whom she also co-starred in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films. The last time the duo attempted an adventure, though, the period drama was at the peak of its fame and they quickly found their outing thwarted by cell-phone wielding fans.
“We went to a flower show, the two of us, at Hampton Court Palace,” Wilton recalled. “At this time of the year, there are a lot of these wonderful flower shows. But we actually had to leave because the two of us together caused too much of a bonanza. We nearly were trampled by people wanting to take pictures, because they could not believe that Lady Crawley and the Dowager were going out together in real life.” (Smith, who has also talked about the incident, deadpanned, “It was dreadful . . . You would think you’d be safe with gardeners.”)
With Downton Abbey off the air, a movie not yet confirmed, and fan fervor possibly cooling off, the two actresses are finally plotting their reunion—their first out in the real world since the flower show debacle. Confirmed Wilton with a laugh, “We are actually going to try going somewhere next week.”
