Like Prince Philip, the actor Tobias Menzies, who plays him in Seasons 3 and 4 of “The Crown,” occupies prewar lodgings in London. He shares his home not with Queen Elizabeth II but with a black cat named Bernie, who came to him as a stray. “My cat’s shouting at me,” he said on a recent Zoom from his kitchen, as Bernie piped up in the background. “I might have forgotten to feed him.” Menzies, forty-six, wore eyeglasses and an oxford shirt, an open cabinet behind him exposing cookbooks and a toaster. (“A backstage view,” he said, laughing.) When lockdown began, he had just moved back into his flat, after renovations had required him to couch-surf. “One of the places where I stayed was with Helena, which was delightful,” he said. “I was sort of an outer satellite of the Bonham Carter family.”
On “The Crown,” he and Helena Bonham Carter, as Princess Margaret, are both outer satellites of the Queen. The role of Margaret has given Bonham Carter a chance to romp (“There was a young lady from Dallas!” she says, trading limericks with L.B.J. at a White House dinner), and the role of Philip has given Menzies a chance to invest a stolid figure with layers of intrigue. “What’s continually being unwrapped with Philip is this contradictory tension—quite a lot of emotion for the desire for things to be incredibly straightforward and unemotional,” he said. “Even in interviews where he’s really giving very little away, there’s a hot emotionality that seems to pour off him, despite his best attempts.” In the new season, which dives headlong into the eighties, Diana (Emma Corrin) comes on the scene, as does Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson). “That’s the last thing this country needs,” Philip tells the Queen (Olivia Colman), as they watch the news. “Two women running the shop.” The Queen disagrees.
Menzies is tall, lean, and understatedly handsome, with grooved cheeks and a brow that creases with concern. Whether he’s playing Brutus, on “Rome”; the academic Frank Randall or his ancestor Black Jack Randall, whipping fiend, on “Outlander”; or the nobleman Edmure Tully, on “Game of Thrones,” whose wedding ends in mass murder, Menzies conveys the sense that there’s much going on beneath the surface. All actors, he said, “come with a set of things that come for free, that you bring to every part, where the unconscious aspects of you bump into the work.” His might be “a certain kind of . . .” He trailed off, thinking. “Reticence.”
Early in the fourth season, Philip seals his son’s fate during a weekend at Balmoral, in Scotland, when Diana visits and flatters Philip on a stag-hunting excursion. (“Good shot, sir!”) Season 3 showcases Philip’s interior life, especially in a midlife-crisis episode, in which he becomes fixated on the moon landing. (“Extraordinary. What men. What courage.”) The camera lingers on his face as it cycles through quiet shades of disbelief, wonder, and amusement, his eyes brimming with tears.
Menzies was born in London, to a drama-teacher mother and a BBC radio-producer father. Growing up, “we never paid a huge amount of attention to the Royal Family,” he said. His parents separated when he was six, and he and his mother and brother moved to Kent, where he attended a Waldorf school. “In my teens, in the early nineties, my mum was taking me to see theatre, the best stuff that was going on in London,” he said. “There was this explosion of visual theatre, dance theatre, movement theatre.” (He explored that realm himself, and hoped to attend mime school, but couldn’t afford it; he went to drama school instead.) As a teen, he saw Wallace Shawn’s “mad, amazing” one-man play “The Fever,” at the Edinburgh Festival. “This character goes through a fever of self-recrimination, class guilt,” he said. “It always stayed with me.” In 2015, Menzies performed it himself, under the direction of Robert Icke, for a small audience, in a room at the May Fair hotel. “I remember feeling pretty sick to my stomach every night before I did it,” he said. But Shawn himself came—“a great privilege”—and “seemed very delighted by what we’d done.”
Lockdown has given him time to reflect—not a Philip-style midlife crisis but a sharpening of focus. He’d like to do some “highly authored film work,” he said—“working with, you know, the Paul Thomas Andersons and the Joanna Hoggs, these filmmakers who I admire so much.” His next project is a second season of Aisling Bea’s Channel 4 dramedy, “This Way Up,” in which he plays her potential love interest, a moody widower with a young son. In the first season, “I’m not a great dad, and I’m pretty distant,” Menzies said, smiling. Another onion to be peeled, perhaps? “So many onions,” he said, laughing. “My eyes are watering.” ♦
