Heavy is the head that wears the crown, but who better to do it than Olivia Colman?
The actress, who won an Oscar for playing Queen Anne in The Favourite earlier this year, makes her debut as Queen Elizabeth in a new teaser trailer for The Crown.
The series’ third season arrives on Netflix on 17 November.
Claire Foy, who played a young version of the corgi-loving monarch for two seasons to much critical acclaim, has passed the torch ― or sceptre in this case ― to Olivia, now portraying the royal over a 13-year span, from 1964 to 1977.
The teaser shows Olivia contemplating a new portrait of her next to one of Claire as Elizabeth, quipping that she’s transitioned from a young woman to an “old bat”.
“A great many changes,” she remarks in the trailer. “Nothing one can do about it. One just has to get on with it.”
The third season sees the royal family struggling to “meet the challenges of a rapidly changing Britain,” the season’s official description says, as the series once again pulls from the biggest news stories of the time:
“From cold-war paranoia, through to the jet-set and the space age ― the exuberance of the 1960s and the long hangover of the 1970s ― Elizabeth and the Royals must adapt to a new, more liberated, but also more turbulent world.”
In addition to Colman, Helena Bonham Carter now stars as Princess Margaret, Tobias Menzies as the Duke of Edinburgh, Josh O’Connor as Prince Charles, Erin Doherty as Princess Anne, Ben Daniels as Lord Snowdon, Jason Watkins as Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and Charles Dance as Lord Mountbatten.