‘The Crown:’ Production Designer Alison Harvey on Capturing Russia, Egypt, and a Declining Monarchy in Season 5

To watch The Crown is to be transported to England over a span over several fascinating decades. For five seasons, I have watched in awe, transfixed by how the cast and crew manage to transform into iconic cultural figures, pouting away in stunning recreations of Buckingham Palace and lush summer homes. The drama is good, but what keeps me watching is the grandeur of it all.

Alison Harvey is the woman responsible for recreating these enviable settings. Her meticulous production design talent won her an Emmy in 2020. Era-appropriate telephones and lamp shades; Dominic West’s Prince Charles’ desk filled with proper stationery, or the burnt-down Winsor Castle, it’s all under Harvey’s jurisdiction, and it’s a task she handles with impeccable taste and obsessive attention to detail.

Here in an interview with Awards Daily, Harvey dives into those details—the blink-and-you-‘ll-miss-it subtleties that add character to every carefully planned frame. Read more from Harvey below:

 Awards Daily: Season 5 of The Crown set the scene for me.

 Alison Harvey: I’ve been on for all five seasons now. I start with the script and try and get a sense of each decade. So trying to get a sense of the mid-nineties—color palettes, textures, reference, and doing a lot of research into that. Every season evolves from the last. It’s a nice segue, but then you have to take a step back and look at each decade on its own and see what’s changed and how you can refresh it and how you can add to it and make it feel it’s got its own visual identity compared to the season before.

 AD: Are you able to see royal archives or any resources that the public doesn’t have access to? 

 AH: No, I’m afraid not. We’re just like everybody else. We go and visit the palaces as a tourists and try and get a sense of the scale, dimensions, color palettes, etc. It’s an imagining of what we think goes on behind the public rooms. I’ve been to a lot of privately owned, stately homes around Britain to see the behind-the-scenes of how people live. There is normality behind the stateliness. There are always domestic elements, just people living a normal life behind the scenes. Obviously, the royals have a few more servants than most, but we make our best guess of what it’s like. There’s an amazing research department who do their best to pull out any nuggets of information. I read biographies or autobiographies. I read Camilla’s biography, Charles’s biography, Diana’s; any kind of books which have little nuggets of information about what the royals might like, what their hobbies might be. Anything that you can hang onto that might help amplify a scene. For Charles, the subtext of his dressing room was his love of classical architecture and his antipathy to modern architecture, and his love of landscape design history. He once helped design a town that was based on 18th-century architecture because he believed that it was more appropriate for the area. So, we had lots of plans and building schemes of what he was doing in his spare time, but it was never scripted. It’s nice to put in little things for the actor and for anybody that might know to spot what Charles was interested in. 

 AD: The production design mirrors the coldness of the institution while also reflecting the inner lives of the royals. What are those details that you add to bring life to these spaces?

 AH: I’m glad to hear you say that. What is quite difficult in The Crown is that all the royals are surrounded by servants, you can’t actually make them inhabit a house like a normal person would inhabit a house. You can’t do that layering of clutter because someone’s always behind them, tidying up. What I’ve decided for myself is that when you look at the references, it’s their personal desks, which no one is ever allowed to touch. So, all the clutter of their lives, all the personal, most intimate aspects of their world, seem to be gathered on their desks—all the photos of the children, the relatives, all their mementos, gifts from around the world, that seem to end up on those desks. That’s where I start with their personality. And the rest, it’s a lot of graphics, magazines of the era, letters, embossed letterheads, all the stamps have to have the right actress as the queen. It’s just layering and trying to give it that texture of as best we can of people inhabiting that space. 

 AD: What aspect of The Crown do you think requires you to do the most thinking outside the box, where you have to depart from the research or rely on your imagination?

 AH: I suppose it’s trying to create a painting or an aesthetic. You’re trying to get the essence of something from the research, from any kind of archive, from the script, and then try and encapsulate that. I can always imagine it in my head so I know where everything goes. And in my mind, I’m making a painting with objects, shapes and textures so that as you look at that frame and it should have either symmetry or beauty within that shape. It’s trying to get the color palettes to work together and reflect the era. It’s things like lampshades changing, and details that look obvious, but are actually quite difficult to do.

The mid-nineties hospital was incredibly difficult to do because all of the tech from 1995 were in a landfill. No one keeps antique medical equipment. No one keeps antique computers; no one keeps vintage paraphernalia that hospitals had. So, recreating all of that for the hazmat and heart surgery scenes was oddly complicated to do. Even though it looks like an ordinary nineties hospital, it started as an empty space. We had to bring everything in and make it look like a functioning hospital with different wards.

You never know quite which part of the design aspect is going to be most tricky. Some things are lovely and poetic. Some things are just really, really complicated, don’t look very exciting, and are hard to achieve.

 AD: Of course, this season, you had episodes that take place in Russia and Egypt.

 AH: The Russian scenes were fun because we went back in time to a completely different era. We had to shoot in England and make it look like Russia. I went through all the diaries of the Romanov’s before they were killed, what their life was like when they’re in Ipatiev House. They spent a lot of time playing cards, the windows were boarded up.

Alexei, the young prince, was not able to move very much. He was very weak, so he had to sleep on his chaise. There are some photographic references of what it looked like—all the icons on the wall. I did a lot of research into what happened that night. The historical research was great fun. And then, of course, we had to do a modern-day version of it in Britain. The scene at the end with Charles and the Queen is supposed to be in the Kremlin, but that started as an empty room, where we had to create a kind of massive throne, which are based on a real Russian palace bed with these very expansive drapes. So, there had to be a freestanding structure that stood near the wall, but not anything touching any walls. And then we added a giant portrait of Catherine the Great. Having to counterbalance the different eras and doing it a in another country, something grander than Buckingham Palace. That was quite fun to do. And then, obviously, doing the streets, I was just trying to marry all the different locations and create cohesive looks so that the whole episode felt believably in Russia. We built a great perimeter fence in different parts of Britain. And it all had to seamlessly slot together as if you’re in that same story arc.

The Egypt bit, that was all filmed in Spain. We had Egyptian advisors telling us what was right and what was wrong. We wanted to be very respectful of what was correct to Egyptian culture and not Eurocentric.

Doing the Duke of Windsor’s montage with Sydney, it was really fun, and that whole relationship was such a lovely one. And then linking through this bizarre true coincidence of Sydney then being employed by Mohamed al-Fayed to be his personal valet. I really loved those stories in those episodes; I think they were really nice to do.

 AD: With the Crown now reaching the nineties, it’s in the recent past and we have such a strong cultural memory of what that looked like versus the Russia episode, or the Egypt episode. Do you have a preference for projects where you can go back and find lots of pictures versus having to fill in the blanks yourself?

 AH: I think when things are historically far enough ago, there is definitely a sense that, we all think we know what the twenties are, we think we know what the thirties are. We feel there are enough reference so that you can think, ‘Oh yeah, I can kind of get the essence of that.’ I think the nineties and certainly the 2000s are slightly nebulous in terms of they don’t quite have an identity. When you look at it, a lot of the nineties does feel a bit like the eighties. A lot of these trends are really lampshades, pretty cushions, painted cabinetry, bare wood. It definitely had a different flavor that then morphs again into the early 2000s But it’s different from the eighties. So, it took a while to research. In my office, I put up all the Vogue front covers of that decade and put them around the room in date order to just get a sense of how the colors change, how the flavors change. And I did the same for the world of interiors with Architectural Digest. You make a tableau so you could get a sense of what colors were in vogue and what was fashionable in a given year. I just sit and look at it for a long time and think, ‘Oh, okay, I think I feel it.’ So eventually, it became the palette that ended up in Kensington Palace, in Diana’s apartment, which was built from scratch. We featured soft sands, terra cottas, and lemons, based a bit on the real photos that her butler took in her real apartment. But because none of that stuff is in vogue now, and a bit like the tech, nothing has been kept so everything had to be made bespoke— all the carpets, drapes, and cushions. Everything had to be designed and made from scratch to kind of try and get a sense of what that era was. Trying to make a kind of pure, nineties capsule English country house style as seen in Diana’s life, was so fun.

The Britannia sequence was a big metaphor for the decline of the monarchy. That was quite complicated; some of the sets were real. Some were builds, some were part builds. And again, quite complicated to create and not be that obvious that you’re looking at a set.

When we burnt down Windsor Castle, we had to do a burnt version of the real locations. We had elements copied; prop chandeliers made as if they’d been burnt; and all the debris. That was quite challenging.

It was a worry when we first started doing it. How are we going to burn a palace and make it look plausible? The Crown feels like quite a simple story. But actually, when you’re in it, there’s so much variety—all the, the different eras and the different countries that you’ve got to try and make look believable. And the quick pace at which we have to get through the sets, we might be doing 12 a week.

 AD: I don’t think it’s simple at all. In fact, what fascinates me about The Crown is the attention to detail. As I’m listening to you, I can’t help but think of the Starbucks cup in Game of Thrones. This idea that one small mistake can take you out of the story.

 AH: Yes, absolutely.

 AD: Do you find that intimidating?

 AH: No, it’s fun. You have to be a little bit obsessive about it. We’ve got timelines of the decades and all the phones, all the televisions, all the mobile phones when they were first invented. You become a weird geek about all sorts of obscure information. It is all fascinating. If you love history and culture and the weirdness of life,  it is a really great thing to work on.

 AD: What element took the most finessing for you to feel like you captured it?

 AH: Egypt was difficult, just in terms of cultural correctness. We had to do Mohamed ‘s super yacht; I don’t know if it was difficult conceptually, but, practically, it was very difficult because we had to dress it remotely, having never been on it. And then take everything on board, change all the artwork, change the furniture, and we had one day because it was so expensive to hire a ship. We had one day to get in and get dressed, and then we were shooting. So that was technically quite challenging. You had to imagine every room in your mind before you got there and hope that what you put in there is going to look right and fit.

You want to have the details correct for every character and what suits their story arc. The carriage building that we had to do for Philip for that episode where he meets with Penny. Again, we had to learn all about carriage driving. We learned how to make wheels and visited the queen’s royal carriage makers and had a day there with them and learned what we needed to make so that those scenes felt right.

We try our best to be authentic with everything. I don’t know how much you notice on screen, but it’s all there if you want to look for it.

 AD: I’ve been so lucky to speak to many different members of The Crown’s cast and crew. I’m interested in how working on the show shapes your personal relationship to the institution. As I was watching Charles’ coordination, I kept thinking, ‘Well, if The Crown were to do this, what would it look like?’ How do you feel having been in royal orbit for so long? 

 AH: I have to say when I first started The Crown, I did wonder, ‘Who’s going to want to watch this? The Queen, is she that interesting?’ You start to unravel it and look into it and it’s absolutely fascinating. My husband is like, ‘No, God, we’ve got to watch another royal documentary.’ I’ve spent seven years watching every royal documentary that there is. I’ve got a whole bookshelf of books about the royals, having come from ground zero on my level of interest.

Watching Charles’s coronation was really fascinating because I knew who does what and what the uniform means, why they’re carrying that weird stick. It does give you a certain depth of appreciation, I suppose.