Gillian Anderson Explains Why The Crown Ended At 'The Right Spot'

Gillian Anderson thinks The Crown ended at “the right spot” when it wrapped up with season six last year, which depicted the show ending in 2005. 

Anderson, who portrayed British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in season four of the Netflix hit, told ET last week that the show “was getting too close to present-day”. 

“It’s much easier when it was further in the past, and I think people didn’t have necessarily a direct relationship with the people on the screen,” she said.

Anderson’s comments echo those of her former co-star, Helena Bonham Carter, who also felt it was time for the show to draw to a close.

“I don’t think they should carry on, actually,” Bonham Carter said in an interview with The Guardian last year. “I’m in it and I loved my episodes, but it’s very different now.”

“When The Crown started it was a historic drama, and now it’s crashed into the present,” she added.

In a featurette for Netflix released last year, The Crown creator and writer Peter Morgan shared why he felt it was the right time to say goodbye to audiences. 

“It was always my feeling that I didn’t want to come right up to the present,” Morgan said. “I always wanted to remain a careful distance from where we are now.” 

The challenge, he explained, was that his team “had to construct, narratively, an episode in which you were genuinely satisfied that you had reached the end, even though you were almost 20 years from the end”.