The chicken wings and guacamole turned up at London’s Soho House just before The Crown won the Emmy for best drama series.
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It was 4 a.m. Monday in the Greek Street members club when the telecast finished, but the cast and crew of Netflix’s series were celebrating. As creator Peter Morgan, who won his first Emmy for writing, said, “We’re going to have a party now.”
The cast of the royal drama was celebrating with its own red-carpet event in Soho, London as a result of the travel ban that currently precludes non-U.S. citizens or permanent residents from entering the U.S. from the UK, grounding a lot of folks in the capital.
British talent and shows in general will be celebrating after another night of dominating America’s top television awards night. More than half of the Primetime Emmy Awards were given to Brits, with Deadline’s calculations counting 14 of the 27 awards. That’s not even counting the Best Comedy Series award for Ted Lasso, a very British show about football, or Jason Sudekis Lead Actor in a Comedy Series win (although we are counting Gillian Anderson, who grew up in the UK, and New Zealand director Jessica Hobbs’ wins for The Crown).
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Hannah Waddingham, Brett Goldstein, Halston’s Ewan McGregor, I May Destroy You’s Michaela Coel and Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver were joined by wins for The Crown crew, which included Morgan, Anderson, Olivia Colman, Josh O’Connor and Tobias Menzies in addition to the top drama series award.
In fact, The Crown’s O’Connor was the only member of the Left Bank show in the L.A. venue on Sunday rather than in London. He also forgot his UK mobile phone so he wasn’t able to contact his friends from the show.
When Morgan was told this, he said backstage that his message to O’Connor was, “We miss him. I mean Helena Bonham-Carter was never going to give up a night’s sleep so she’s fast asleep, but Josh, we were hoping he was going to come back to the UK but I think he’s about to start filming — but we miss him terribly. We all saw him and we were screaming and shouting when he won. I mean the roof came off.”
The British domination was even more pronounced than in 2019, the year that Fleabag dominated with a little help from Jesse Armstrong’s Succession. That year saw 13 wins out of 27 for the likes of Phoebe Waller-Bridge; Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker; Sky co-production Chernobyl, produced by Jane Featherstone; and A Very English Scandal.
That year led to massive deals for the likes of Waller-Bridge, who struck an overall deal with Amazon, a Netflix deal for Brooker, and Featherstone’s Sister becoming a global studio with a tie-up with Elisabeth Murdoch and Stacey Snider.
It was a far cry from the six awards going to Brits in 2018. Even last year’s pandemic-infused event only saw Succession’s Armstrong and Oliver do well, with the likes of Colman, Jeremy Irons, Bonham Carter, Brian Cox, Jodie Comer and Paul Mescal all losing out.
Many of this year’s Brits’ speeches were suitably Anglo-Saxon.
Waddingham used her acceptance speech to shout out the West End theater world, while her colleague Goldstein, who before the Apple TV+ series was best known for his role in Ricky Gervais’ Derek, was largely bleeped out due to his proclivity to swear. Colman kept it short and sweet to thank her father, and Coel gave a poignant speech urging support for survivors of abuse. Winslet said that this decade has to be about women having each other’s backs.
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Anderson said that she was glad that they could get together in London as they were never able to have a wrap party due to Covid. “We didn’t get to properly say goodbye to everybody because of when lockdown happened,” she told AP. “Wrap parties can be a very cathartic experience and when that doesn’t happen, it’s kind of weird it feels like there’s not a proper sense of closure. I wish we were all together because everyone deserves to be here and to be celebrating because no single one of us could have done it without the whole.”
There’s always much talk about the special relationship between the UK and the U.S. and there certainly is a crossover in terms of telly. However, sometimes information does get lost across the pond, as evidenced by one journalist asking Anderson if she had talked to the long-deceased Margaret Thatcher about the role.