London, a tick after 8pm on a Friday, and Claire Foy, who famously played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, is … decidedly unregal. The woman with the patrician power to wear a tiara with the ease of a beanie has undone hair and no make-up, and looks like any other mum working late at home after a day of domesticity. “I cleaned my oven,” Foy says cheerfully. “It was disgusting.”
Since you ask, Foy “went bicarb”, she says. “It did work. It just took about 18 hours for it to work.” The kitchen chore was part of a spring-cleaning burst: “Lots of reorganising and chucking things out. I’m feeling quite proactive. I’m about to start media work again and have a small window between things, so I’m making the most of it.”
The Emmy and Golden Globes winner hasn’t bothered with lighting wherever she is in her home for our Zoom call, so she’s actually quite hard to make out. The lack of glamour feels authentic and, mixed with her talk of career, also the perfect advertisement for Foy’s new project, The Magic Faraway Tree.
The feature film is director Ben Gregor and Paddington 2 writer Simon Farnaby’s take on Enid Blyton’s beloved 1939-1951 series of novels, with Nicola Coughlan and Jennifer Saunders along for the ride. Foy plays Polly, a high-powered professional who burns out and moves her family from London to the English countryside where the kids find an enchanted forest peopled with fantastical beings.
That central tension – kids in meltdown over lost wi-fi who find life without screens is a pathway to adventure, curiosity and connection – is one Foy, 41, finds entirely relatable. Mum to daughter Ivy, 11, with her actor ex-husband Stephen Campbell Moore, she’s called modern parenting “a logistical shitshow” and has a particularly “visceral” hatred of social media.
So much so that Foy only tiptoed back into having any accounts during lockdown after deleting Facebook in the 2000s. “All I was doing was looking at ex boyfriends and people I went to school with, and knew instantly this is not good for someone like me,” she says. “I would be totally sucked in.”
Which is why the star lauds Australia’s ban on social media for under 16s as “a cry for help from parents”. She says, “Everybody’s like, ‘Throw me a bone, I’m trying to figure out how on earth to navigate this world that’s moving so fast.’ We seem to be hurtling into it without pausing to wonder where we want humanity to go.”
All that conflicted, real-life experience of motherhood shaped how Foy approached Polly. “It’s most people’s experience that you struggle to do all things well all the time,” she says. “It’s only when Polly takes stock and goes, ‘I’m working so hard to not spend time with my kids and not feel fulfilled and I’m just sort of on this hamster wheel,’ that they choose to get off.
“She’s just trying to do her best. Everybody is, I think.”
Asked what kind of mum she is in real life, Foy smiles through the half-light. “Oh my god, I’ve got no idea, don’t ask me. I don’t have a plan, I don’t have a mission statement and I certainly don’t know what’s going to happen one day to the next.”
Generations of kids grew up reading Blyton’s Faraway Tree books and imagining the trippiness of characters Moon-Face and Silky and the giant tree with the vertigo-inducing ladder at the top. But Foy didn’t read the books growing up, so she and Ivy listened together to the audio books.
“It would have been quite difficult to do had I come with the baggage of memory,” she says. “Books have a very particular way of becoming really profound for you because they are your imagination as much as the author’s, so I wasn’t burdened by that.”
Faraway Tree is her first children’s movie, and the first Ivy will see her mum in. Why this movie and why now? “It was just such a nice thing to do something that felt very pure – the message is pure,” she says, adding that it was also “the right time with the right people”.
That includes Andrew Garfield (Spider-Man, The Social Network), who plays her character Polly’s on-screen husband Tim. It’s their second screen outing as a married couple after filming 2016 drama Breathe. Foy – coy about her reported real-life relationship with musician Charlie Cunningham, who she’s been snapped with in London since 2023 – laughs when asked the secret to their movie chemistry.
“I don’t know,” she says. “We worked together quite a long time ago and that was a really bonding experience, quite intense.” It’s “a lovely thing”, she adds, “when you get to work with someone again because at least you know they haven’t been totally put off”.
Foy’s CV bristles with dramatic work: Women Talking, H is for Hawk, First Man. Now, suddenly she was on a set full of marshmallow trees, spaghetti fights and joyous chaos with three young co-stars who “were having the time of their lives”, she says.
“My life has continued [after The Crown] but you are sort of freeze-framed in a period of time for a lot of people.”
Claire Foy, actor
No wonder. The sets of the magical lands involved roller-skating disco elves, spells and “tables and tables of giant gummy bears and marshmallow flowers” in the Land of Goodies. “I totally stole things,” she says. “We still have these giant gummy bears but the sell-by date is in 40 years.”
That full-blown fantasy of movies is what first drew her to acting. The youngest of three children of a pharmaceuticals worker mother and a salesman father, Foy grew up in Manchester and Leeds in England’s north before moving to the countryside after her parents divorced. She was drawn to old films – Calamity Jane, Breakfast at Tiffany’s – and a teenage obsession with Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet cemented her interest in acting.
She studied drama and screen studies at a Liverpool university before training at the Oxford School of Drama. This led Foy to play Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit (2008) and a stream of other roles including Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall (2015), where a tight budget meant her execution stunt used a cast of Julianne Moore’s head, left over from Children of Men.
In 2016 her role as the young Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown brought a slew of awards and global fame. A decade on, she’s still “really, really proud of it and proud I was in it” and doesn’t mind when people still bring it up as her crowning achievement.
“A lot has happened to me in the years since I stopped shooting it,” she says. “My life has continued but you are sort of freeze-framed in a period of time for a lot of people. I totally get it.” Foy is non-committal about the actual royals: “I played Elizabeth Mountbatten at a very particular period of time. Outside of that, I’m not very knowledgeable.”
Over the years she’s learned impressive skills from roles: falconry, horse riding, the precise art of royal deportment. Singing, however, is not on the list, despite Foy being word perfect on Rapper’s Delight on Jimmy Fallon’s show. “No, there’s never been a secret karaoke phase. Singing is a very exposing thing to do. You’d have to be absolutely smashed to do that in front of a group of people.”
Ask what she’d be doing if you turned up at her door on a day off and we’re back almost where we started. “I’d be on my bloody phone!” Foy says. “Struggling to reply to anyone. I’m terrible. Probably cleaning, and procrastinating, moving things from room to room with no visible sign of achievement. Maybe a bit of gardening.”
Wardrobe tidying, too: “There’s always too much in it so it gets out of control. There’s no real method, it’s cram everything in then things fall down the back of the drawers and I find them three months later.”
The star takes a beat when asked which bit of her life now she’d bottle forever. “Oh my goodness, being healthy and appreciative,” she says. “I’m just so, so lucky. Life is nothing if you’re not healthy – so at this moment, being physically able to be in my body and breathe in and out and enjoy my life.”
Ahead of turning 42 in mid-April, she says she has a responsibility to her body. “To listen to its cues and try and understand what it doesn’t like or it does like,” she says. “That means moving, being in my body, whether that’s exercise or walking, dancing around and listening to music.” Because her job calls on giving emotions a workout, when she’s not working “it’s that thing of giving yourself a bit of an emotional break”.
She says it from somewhere in the warm dark of her London home, oven freshly cleaned, Friday night winding down. No ring light, no performance. Just a woman breathing in and out, enjoying her life – and now, finally taking her daughter to the movies.
The Magic Faraway Tree is in cinemas now.
Get the best of Sunday Life magazine delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. Sign up here for our free newsletter.
