'Crown' Star Claire Foy: 'I Was a Lunatic Trying to Breastfeed and Be the Queen'

The actress juggled new motherhood with her big new role

Photo: Robert Viglasky/Netflix

Actress Claire Foy had to juggle more than learning her lines when she took on the role of Queen Elizabeth.

Foy, 32, was pregnant when she accepted the part of the young Queen in Netflix’s new series The Crown, which premieres tomorrow. “I was an idiot—such a huge idiot!” the star, who welcomed her first child with husband Stephen Campbell Moore in February 2015, tells British talk show host Graham Norton. “I was a lunatic trying to breastfeed and be the Queen. It was an odd thing to do.”

Pulling double duty, she would pump milk each day for her baby while she was in makeup on the set. “Every morning I’d be hooked up to the pump, and without fail someone would say, ‘Someone’s phone is going!’ ” she said on the talk show, which airs on BBC1 tomorrow.

Capturing the way the Queen speaks was another tricky hurdle, she says: “[The royals] are properly posh and as the filming went on our accents got more ridiculous!”

Her costar Matt Smith also appeared on the show and revealed he got some special advice from Prince William about playing his formidable grandfather Prince Philip after they met briefly at a polo match. “I thought, ‘Oh god, I’m going to die of embarrassment,'” says Smith. “And all he said was, ‘He’s an absolute legend.’ ”

The Graham Norton Show airs on BBC1 on Friday at 10:35 p.m. U.K. time.