Colman called Staunton’s casting “amazing”, then suggested the newcomer could overshadow her. “It’s almost, ‘wish she wasn’t quite good,’” she said, smiling. That prompted Bonham Carter to predict a battle of the stars after the series ends.

Colman was asked if she had any advice for her successor. Her terse reply: “Good luck. The wig’s itchy.”

Casting director Robert Sterne, a veteran who won three Emmys for his work on HBO’s Game of Thrones and a 2018 trophy for The Crown, said swapping out actors wasn’t preordained when he began working with series creator and writer Peter Morgan.

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It was an open question “whether we aged-up actors across their lifespan or were bold and we cast each time,” Sterne said in an interview. Choosing the latter option meant a series of challenges and opportunities, both for the show and its parade of actors.

“You spend a lot of time looking at the pictures and images of people at particular stages of their life,” he said. “You also have to take into account the way that the previous actor portrayed [the role]. Who do you think can take that baton and run with it?” He described this as reinventing the role, “but hopefully not in a jarring way”.

Every move, especially a major cast change, is a critical one for the popular series that reportedly cost more than US$100 million for its first two seasons alone.

Actors, including illustrious ones, have been happy to accept hand-me-downs. Colman came to The Crown after winning an Academy Award and other honours for 2018’s The Favourite, in which she played a far earlier British monarch, Queen Anne.

Staunton was an Oscar nominee for Vera Drake; Manville for Phantom Thread; Bonham Carter for The King’s Speech and The Wings of the Dove, and Jonathan Pryce, the future Prince Philip, for The Two Popes.

John Lithgow, another Oscar nominee and a rare American in the primarily British cast, had the part of political leader Winston Churchill to himself and snared an Emmy Award for it.

All those playing the pivotal role of Queen Elizabeth are able to to convey “an ordinary woman put in extraordinary circumstances,” Sterne said of the queen as portrayed in The Crown.

It requires an actor “who can carry you along … and make you feel for them and believe in the reality of it. They’re all really extraordinary at that,” he said. Foy won a 2018 Emmy for her performance.

There’s also room on the royal family tree for younger, less familiar talent, including Corrin and Erin Doherty, who plays the queen’s feisty daughter, Princess Anne, and proved a revelation.

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“Actors will have this incredible connection with this character that you don’t see coming,” Sterne said. When Doherty auditioned, “she just had such a connection with that character. She’d watched a lot of YouTube videos [of the princess] and said, ‘I just love this woman, I just know her, I think she’s great.’” She delivered in her try-out and in the series with a “really excellent” performance, Sterne said.

Corrin was put on the spot in her audition by acclaimed writer Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) to sing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s All I Ask of You. Sterne called up a karaoke version on a computer and offered to sing along.

“She was blushing as she was doing it, and sang it completely beautifully,” Sterne recounted. “It was incredibly sweet and kind of encapsulated the spirit of Diana that we were looking for … I thought, ‘Well, this part isn’t going to go anywhere else now.’”

O’Connor said he relished his time on the series, including saying goodbye to a role he knew wasn’t for keeps – just as with Shakespeare’s works.

“If you play Hamlet, you know that there are 100 people who’ve played Hamlet before you, there’s going to be 100 people after you,” he said. “And they’ll all do it differently, and that’s the joy.”

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This article originally appeared on AP.