Season three of The Crown brought on a much-discussed cast change with Olivia Colman, Tobias Menzies, and Helena Bonham Carter as the trio of senior royals and the introduction of Prince Charles (Josh O’Conner), Princess Anne (Erin Doherty), and Camilla Parker Bowles (Emerald Fennell). Tasked with transforming this new iteration of the Windsors was hair and makeup designer Cate Hall, whose work garnered buzz, praise, and her first Emmy nomination.
Having polished and perfected the signature looks of her actors, Hall returned to season four with a new Herculean challenge—introducing The People’s Princess and The Iron Lady to the world of Peter Morgan’s Netflix drama.
Over the course of The Crown‘s fourth season and under the stewardship of Hall’s hair and makeup designs, Emma Corrin transforms from a fresh-faced Lady Diana Spencer to the magnetic Diana, Princess of Wales. And Gillian Anderson, one of television’s most recognizable faces, plays Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from Downing Street newcomer to an aged and weary political pariah.
The 12-year time span of season four proves a stunning showcase of Hall’s talent as a designer. The hair becomes grayer, the wrinkles deeper, the 80s bringing with it bigger hair and bolder colors. Each styling choice subtle, yet painstakingly deliberate, allowing the audience to have a fully immersive experience, giving way to The Crown’s best season yet. It’s no wonder Hall has been asked to return for season five, with yet another new cast, and do it all over again.
Read our interview with Cate Hall below as she discusses The Crown season four and delivering those uncanny transformations.
Awards Daily: What was it like coming back to the world of The Crown after having done the third season?
Cate Hall: It was an absolute pleasure because I joined The Crown in season three. And it was kind of like a season to work out how to do the job. So, in season four, I felt like we had a process that was quite established, and to come back with a lot of those characters established— we could really focus on the new ones—that was a real treat.
AD: What lessons from season three did you carry on to season four? How did you update the looks?
CH: We were fairly subtle. We didn’t do anything massive with Prince Philip (Menzies). We allowed more fuzzy hair. And we used flicking pigmentation to give him age spots. We gave Queen Elizabeth (Colman) some more grey hairs, and we used powder and beauty makeup to try and age her slightly. It was about coming back and really trusting the system and the process that we had in place. And when we came to Margaret Thatcher [Anderson] and Princess Diana (Corrin), we had an opportunity to really play with their looks and go through that process, which was lovely.
AD: When dealing with a historical period piece like The Crown, how closely are you looking at the images and saying, ‘Okay, I need to make this as close to real-life as possible’ versus ‘I’m going to take this idea, and play with it, and create something different.’
CH: Yeah, it’s funny because it’s a bit of both. We’re doing season five and I’ve got archival images everywhere. I make these extensive books that are in chronological order. You can really see how people’s looks progress—exactly when they cut their hair, when they dyed their hair. And I feel like we’re informed by all of that. We do this big extensive research period, and we might pick out tiny little details that we feel give us something, But it’s more, Helena (Bonham Carter) put it really well when she said, ‘We were looking for the bastard love child of the actor and the character.’
I think for me, I focus on the outline. So I make sure that the wig gives them a silhouette that’s really recognizable, and then we trust that the performance will allow the audience to fill in the bit in the middle themselves. We don’t go too documentary style with the pictures because the more we do that, the more that the pictures will lead you down a wayward path. You end up parodying the person they’re playing. We’re always trying to find this really fine balance between parody and performance. And I think authenticity is key.
The period is really, really important to me. So, if I have a character who’s less well-known, it’s vital that they are period-appropriate at the very least. But, when it comes to a real character transformation, the photo reference can be misleading, so we try to be informed by it but somehow leave it behind as well.
AD: The Crown introduced Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher this season. I have to ask, how terrifying was it going in, knowing you had to recreate these iconic women?
CH: To have to introduce somebody as iconic as Princess Diana could have been a total disaster, but luckily they cast Emma Corrin. So I feel like that wasn’t the biggest leap for audiences to make because Emma was fantastic.
But when they cast Gillian Anderson as Thatcher, I knew she’d do a fantastic job, but I think she’s one of the most attractive women in the world. So that felt to me like an enormous psychological leap to ask an audience to make. And I think that was quite intimidating. We worked so hard to figure out how to get the texture right in the wig. I think that’s the thing with Margaret Thatcher—it’s this really inimitable kind of quality to her hair where it’s basically destroyed. And of course, that’s completely counter-intuitive because these wigs are so expensive, but we worked and worked and worked to find a method that meant we could try and reproduce that very, very specific hairstyle in a way that will be instantly recognizable. That look took a long time to crack because of this thing of needing to get that hair texture right. And it took a really long time to get to the point where we all felt like the color was right. We would color it and recolor it and highlight it—it was a pretty extensive camera testing process until everybody felt they could sign off on it.
AD: Are there any details or tricks with the makeup and hairstyling that you’re particularly proud of? Where you look back and you go, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe we thought of that.’
CH: Yeah. This might sound ridiculous, but I love how much attention we pay to eyebrows. We would bleach Prince Phillip’s eyebrows every three days because the royal family, oddly, a lot of them have these very blonde eyebrows. And it’s one of the things that really sells the character.
Tobias Menzies, bless him, had some of the longest times in the chair because to transform a brunette man into a blonde, a natural blonde, felt quite extensive. And it had to become something we could do relatively quickly because we had to do it every morning.
You know, in terms of research, we’d been to see Princess Margaret’s hairdressers and used a color sample that they’d kept, helping us choose the color for her wigs— that was really cool, these little bits of authenticity.
For me, it’s all about the haircuts. So often, I think you find people who are not necessarily in a position to cut a wig. And we actually got a hairdresser from the 1980s to come and teach us the Diana cut—that cut inspired a generation of people. And we’ve got characters across the series with variations of that very particular haircut. It’s those kinds of research details and that commitment to authenticity that I think are really, really cool.
AD: Have you had the chance to go back and watch season four as an audience member? Was there anything that stood out to you?
CH: That’s really interesting. You know, what’s funny is going back and watching it as an audience member. I think when you’re in it, it’s this enormous job spanning a period of 12 years, the scale of it doesn’t really feel that big day-to-day because you’re just reprioritizing and attacking your to-do list. But when you watch it on Netflix, the distance traveled from beginning to end is, I think quite brilliant, and something I’m quite proud of. When we start that process, I have an idea of how we’re going to travel. And then you get strategic because you have to think, well, we shoot in these four shooting blocks or five shooting blocks, and not necessarily chronologically. So I break the whole period down into two sections. And then make very strategic decisions about how to evolve the look so that hopefully when it’s edited together, you see this evolution from one period to another or one kind of fashion trend to another, but it’s not super noticeable.
And I felt really, really happy with the kind of story distance we traveled. And also, the thing that you don’t necessarily get when you’re constantly scrutinizing the hair and makeup is the broader sense of character in the overall narrative. And it’s so poetic, and all of the directors are fantastic. For me, it was a pleasure just to enjoy it for a minute rather than scrutinize it.
This thing that I’m so proud of is how we take someone like Diana, who starts as a teenager and ends as this kind of media-savvy icon. For me, that journey is the thing I’m really proud of. Episode 10 is the culmination of that whole narrative journey. I think we’ve managed to take her from this ingenue to this woman who was both scarred and very clever in her appearance and very constructed. And, you know, we went through three different wig types, through lots of different techniques, I think we managed to tell that story.
AD: Can you tell me more about that? How were you able to showcase Princess Diana’s maturity and character arc through Emma Corrin’s makeup and hairstyling in later episodes?
CH: Yes. We basically started with no makeup on her skin. We would do period eye makeup and cream blush. And then, as the show progressed, we would use the sort of 1980s period beauty makeup to age her— that pigmented powdery thing, and we would use very sharp angles. And then with the wig, we used a bald piece underneath so that you could seek skin to make it look more realistic. We dyed in the roots to give it extra depth and we overly highlighted and styled it for episode 10. What we ended up with, I think, is a look that was much more manufactured. But, she still looked incredibly vulnerable. So it was deliberately sort of imperfect.
And episode 10 also represents Margaret Thatcher’s decline. We took pieces of hair out from behind her hairline so she was thinning and balding from all that rolling she had to do on her hair. And again, instead of using beauty makeup to age her, we took makeup away. And Gillian is wonderfully not at all vain. She just said, ‘Anything you can do, do it.’ She had less makeup on her skin and less concealer under her eyes. And we used red in her waterline. And again, I think we made her look quite aged and quite vulnerable in that last episode.
AD: Has being so embedded in the lives of these royals shaped or changed your perspective on the royal family and these people that you were, in a sense, trying to recreate?
CH: Yeah. I feel like I’ve developed a knack and I’ll be stuck when this ends, and I’m asked to do something based on a script and imagination because I’m now in this transforming real people niche. But I guess for me because Peter Morgan writes these characters so beautifully, I’ve had a love affair. I was never into the royal family before, but certainly, over this time and spending so much time sitting with them and looking at them and examining them, I’ve fallen in love with them. And they’ve sort of embedded themselves in my life like they’re my friends. I’ll see a picture of one of them in the newspaper, and I’ll not instantly be able to distinguish between reality and one of my cast. There’s something weird happening in my brain for sure. [Laughs]
AD: Who was the most fun in the makeup chair. I saw some behind-the-scenes footage of Olivia Colman and she just looks like a blast to hang out with every morning.
CH: She was so wonderful. I mean, they all have their different styles. Some of the actors were straight into the chair, reading and prepping and maybe talking to a dialogue coach and that sort of thing.
And Olivia wants nothing to do with any of that. She’s so natural that when she walks onto the set, she just does the thing. I mean, everyone gets annoyed with that because she’s so good like that. She just loves her time in hair and makeup—she’s so social. And she will make her own cups of tea. She won’t have anyone fussing over her. As an ensemble, they all got on famously well. Josh (O’Connor) and Emma had such a connection. Their connection and their charisma felt very real.
We just had a lot of fun with them. It was not a job where anyone is pushing their ego over somebody else’s. It was an enormous amount of fun.
AD: You mentioned season five. I’m so thrilled you’ll be back! Is there anything that you can tell me about how that process is going?
CH: I’m very, very early days in season five. So, you know, what’s available to the press is all that I know. We have Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth, and we’re on our way to testing those first few royals, and they’re going to be wonderful. They’re such fantastic actors. It’s not much of an insight, but I am so enjoying the process. And from the privileged position of having done it twice before. I feel like with a new cast and with bits of the new cast each season, you’re treated to never having to repeat the process. You’re never bored and it’s a real thrill.
All episodes of The Crown are available to stream on Netflix.
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