Battle Royal

With two tough-as-nails roles, the dauntless Claire Foy sheds her crown for a new set of armor. Nathan Heller witnesses the transformation.

- David Sims

Strange as it sounds, Claire Foy knows the London canals intimately, she tells me, having once steered a boat through the longest of their tunnels and somehow come out the other side. The two of us are standing on an embankment in Camden, in north-central London, toward the summer’s end. In another age, a stroll along this waterfront would have been a gritty passage. Now it’s calm and scenic, dampened only by the weather. A refreshing cloudburst, heavy and cool, is drenching the city after weeks of lazy and uncomfortable heat.

“I went on a hen do once,” Foy says, recalling a friend’s floating bachelorette party on the canal. “No one else was brave enough to operate the barge, so I did. Ridiculous.” She bursts into incredulous laughter under the umbrella we share. In a navy raincoat, a nautical blue-and-white-striped sweater, and crisp trousers, Foy projects a hint of the Britannic polish she perfected playing Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown—the role that, in its delicate control, made her famous. (“She has incredibly keen eyes for the small details which inform the bigger story,” her costar Matt Smith says.) The tour boat we’ve been waiting for has begun boarding, and she lets a family on an ill-fated sightseeing outing pass ahead. Rain is pouring in sheets off the sides of an awning overhead as a guide named Lee murmurs over a PA.

“There used to be bikes and trolleys and, you know, the odd corpse that you’d find in the canal,” Foy notes cheerily, after the boat sets off. “Now they’ve cleaned it up.” She smiles. “Sit back, relax, and enjoy the rain.”