Double Emmy-Nominee Jonathan Pryce On Embracing Grandfatherly Roles in ‘The Crown,’ ‘Slow Horses’

Actor Jonathan Pryce received two nomination at the 2024 Emmy Awards. His bid for Supporting Actor in a Drama Series comes from the final season of Netflix’s Emmy-winning The Crown. His second bid comes from AppleTV+’s Slow Horses where he is recognized for Guest Actor in a Drama Series. Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Pryce reveals how both characters, both grandfatherly roles, mean a great deal to him. In Slow Horses, Pryce sought to give respect and honor to people with dementia. In The Crown, Pryce discusses Prince Philip’s complex history and closed off emotions, which contrasted with his own feelings and enhanced the performance. He also reveals how he’s coming up with a fun way to figure out where he will be sitting at this year’s Emmy ceremony.

Awards Daily: In your Emmy submission episode for The Crown, “Willsmania,” you have to get a lot of things across with just your facial expressions. From the scene with Charles talking about issues with William, the camera just lingers on your face as you’re thinking, and then there are the scenes where we’re looking at the home movies and the pictures and the letters. Then of course, there is the great scene in the end of the garden where you’re watching Charles and William hug. How did you get into the mindset to get across so much emotion?

Jonathan Pryce: 52 years of acting, 41 years of being a father, but mostly, as you brought up, sense memories of things. It was very simple and obvious he was now the wise grandfather dispensing advice to his grandson. But at the same time recognizing his own past and his own failings as a father, and the failings his father had committed. Philip really grew up without a father. (He did have a father figure.) There was no acting required, very simple and very straightforward to do.

The odd thing was looking at a newsreel of myself when it wasn’t really me. I had to make a huge adjustment then, that was the most difficult thing about the scene, because I was convinced that all the people would be looking at it and saying oh, look, there’s Matt Smith, and not think of it as me looking at me. That scene was an absolute gift from Peter Morgan, and I had a wonderful time working on it and a great time working with Ed McVey, who played William. All kinds of things came into play. It was Ed’s first job on film and I felt some of that, with me being the older actor who could hopefully impart some wisdom about the process. The great thing about him as a young actor is that he is a great listener, he’s learned that skill already. It was just good to do.

Awards Daily: With your other Emmy nomination for Slow Horses your character is going through cognitive decline, which is a new thing for that character and it looks like, based on the trailer, it is going to be a major part of the next season, especially in relation to River. What is it like going through those changes with your character?

Jonathan Pryce: It was something I was aware was going to be coming for the character from past seasons, and I always knew where I was going to go with it. It is something you see through River’s eyes. You can’t expect the viewer all the time to notice it, so you rely on the other characters to tell you a story in a way. Because River does see the decline in his grandfather. Season 4 is coming in a few weeks time and I’m very excited to see it! I haven’t seen anything since I did a little ADR on it. I’ve had an incredibly good time doing it, I’m very fortunate to have these two shows running at the same time.

For the decline in David I felt I had a huge responsibility to show a character with dementia. Sometimes it can be used as an easy trick to tell a story and I didn’t want to abuse that image. I also feel a great deal of responsibility for people who have dementia. I’m an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society coincidentally. So I feel a double responsibility to show, if I can, dementia in a good light. It is not the first time I’ve played a character with dementia. I did it on stage in The Height of the Storm in London and New York and, while I was doing that, I realized that people who knew someone with dementia would superimpose an image of a loved one on my character.

I met a lot of them at the stage door and they would say seeing that character on stage gave them a great deal of comfort. It gave them an emotional release and allowed them to cry, when they originally had not been able to from the loss of a loved one to dementia. That is a long way around of saying I feel a great deal of responsibility playing David Cartwright with dementia. Again, it is the grandfather role, just with River instead of William, and I realize I’m in my grandfather years and at the moment I’m “giving good grandfather.”

Awards Daily: For your Slow Horses episode submission you did Footprints, where David makes a moral choice that greatly upsets River. River’s relationship with your character is one of the pillars of his professional and personal life in the show. What has the dynamic been like playing with him?

Jonathan Pryce: It has always been interesting to play. It’s good that they’ve shown the fullness of their relationship, the good side and the bad side. You see him be critical of his grandfather, who he held out to be a hero. I think that’s just good storytelling. This isn’t Jack Lowden’s first rodeo, but he is a wonderful young actor to work with and there’s a lot about our relationship you see on screen but it’s unspoken between Jack and I. We didn’t have to sit down and say what we think of each other’s character, and we’ve been able to do it with very little rehearsal. Plus the show is just so well written, it takes care of itself. I’m not going to put myself down again by saying there’s no acting. There’s a fair bit of acting, as I’m up for an acting award. But it is also a lot of fun. They kept the camera rolling when Jack and I finished a scene and we would ad lib conversations between each other. It wasn’t quite as funny as Mel Brooks’ The 2000 Year Old Man, but we’d end up saying outrageous things to each other that we weren’t able to say on camera. So it has been a lot of fun making the show with Jack.

Award Daily: The scene in The Crown that everyone has been talking about, including yourself, is the final shot in the church where Philip talks about not being worried anymore about the next generation because he and Elizabeth will be buried underground. It’s cynical, loving in its own way, and funny in many ways. What can you tell us about that scene?

Jonathan Pryce: It was interesting because it was my final scene in the whole series so it carried all the weight of that. I was not only thinking back as Philip over his life with Elizabeth, but the future chaos and mayhem that would ensue after they have died. But they wouldn’t be bothered by it because they’d be under the gravestone. It was also colored by my thinking of the wonderful two years I’ve had on The Crown, and this will be the last time I was going to talk to Imelda Staunton as the queen. I found it, as I’m sure fans of The Crown did, very touching and moving. What I liked about it was that it was unsentimental, it was very Philip, even the queen found it a little outrageous what he was saying. When I’ve seen the replay I can hear the catch in my throat where I’m saying, “Say one for me.” It was quite an emotional moment, and as I’m walking away there was a little tear welling up. It was a wonderful two seasons with a fantastic company of actors. The best times were when it was just Imelda and I in a scene or the whole family were gathered. We behaved like a family, with all the different levels of abuse with each other. (Laughing)

Awards Daily: Talking about when the family gets together, this is the season where Diana dies, and in the episode in the aftermath Philip originally doesn’t want to go down to London and stays distant from what’s happening. Then when he is down, he is encouraging the grandchildren to walk because they might regret it later. What was it like being in such an intense emotional moment that still resonates with many people?

Jonathan Pryce: What we tried to do is not go with the emotion of the scene, you play against it. What you don’t want to do as an actor is cry, you want the audience to cry. I was just saying some very simple facts to William, things he possibly needed to hear. I have read lots of opinions about people who know Philip and William, and he never did give him that advice, he never needed to give him that advice. In terms of storytelling, which Peter was concerned with, it was necessary to have that scene, because it told so much about Philip’s history and so much about the man William would become.

Everything involving Diana, I had an entirely different reaction than Philip had when it happened. We first heard the news in the early morning. It was our first night that we had spent in a new house in London and, for some reason, we had a television in the bedroom where we normally never have one, but it must have been the only place we were getting a signal. I had turned the radio on and could hear bits of Diana…Paris… something… and then I did something we naturally do now, I turned on the television to see the truth. I never thought in a million years that I would cry at the death of a member of the Royal Family, which tells you something of my regard for the Royal Family, not the people but the institution. But with Diana everything they said about her was true, with Tony Blair calling her the people’s princess.

There was a realization that the royal family were being as emotionally remote with the public as they had been with Diana. We had been filming in Scotland when the director Christian Schwochow brought a rough cut of the scenes leading up to her death. It was so incredibly moving. I was inconsolable watching it, and among the cast and crew there was either silence or crying. I’m getting emotional now thinking about it. The director did incredibly sensitive work choosing not to show anything of the death itself, but everything that surrounds it. It was an incredible piece of filmmaking.

So you take that and my own emotional response to it and then you bury it under Philip’s lack of emotion. But what I knew about Philip was that something he would talk about was the death of his sister in a plane crash, which was a huge thing for him, and I think he must have been carrying that, his personal family grief at the time of Diana’s death. But he had cut himself off from Diana a long time ago, before her death happened. It was an interesting journey my character went on. (I never thought I’d hear myself say that in public.) My very first day of filming was with Elizabeth Debicki as Diana, where I went to her at Kensington Palace and gave her advice and offered myself up as a kind of mentor to her. Then to go a season and a half later and be completely rejecting her was interesting.

Awards Daily: Well, on a totally unemotional subject, you are in three of the eight nominees for Oustanding Drama Series, and you’re up against your co-star Jack Lowden in supporting actor. Is this a very complex Emmy season for you? Are you a good luck charm for drama series?

Jonathan Pryce: [Laughing] It’s great! It’s just great! I didn’t expect to get a nomination. I’m quietly excited about it all. I don’t know about being in competition with Jack, but we’ll both be there in LA so that will be fun. Which table will I sit at? I don’t know. I might table hop–that could be fun. I will see whether Netflix or Apple gives me the best gift. I’ll choose based on that. I should hasten to add I’ve done quite a bit for Netflix now, and from the top down or down up they are excellent people to work for, and I find Apple to be the same. It’s been good.

Awards Daily: Final thoughts?

Jonathan Pryce: I just want to thank my peers for nominating me. You’ve made an old man very happy.

The Crown streams exclusively on Netflix. Slow Horses streams exclusively on AppleTV+.