Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth’s troubled younger sister, in the hit Netflix series The Crown, has said that she believes those involved with the show have a “moral responsibility” to emphasize that the show is not factual.
Bonham Carter’s intervention, which comes in a new official The Crown podcast, seems likely to heap further pressure on the streaming giant to preface the show with a disclaimer along the lines of the “based on a true story” formula commonly employed in Hollywood movies. Britain’s culture minister has already urged such a move, saying of the show: “It’s a beautifully produced work of fiction, so, as with other TV productions, Netflix should be very clear at the beginning it is just that. Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.”
The newly-released podcast, which was recorded earlier in the year, focuses on the seventh episode of the show which tells the story of Margaret discovering she has two first cousins suffering from genetic disorders who have been hidden away in an asylum and declared dead.