Trivia / The Queen

• Ability over Appearance: Michael Sheen looks nothing like Tony Blair, but he nails Blair's mannerisms and speech patterns so well that Blair himself conflated lines from this film with things he actually said.
• Approval of God: Queen Elizabeth II herself enjoyed Helen Mirren's performance and actually invited her to Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, Mirren had to decline due to several schedule conflicts.
• Fake Brit: American James Cromwell as Prince Phillip. And it's stranger than that: Phillip is himself a part-Danish, part-German born in Greece who first moved to Britain when he was seven.
• Font Anachronism: While the film is set around the date of Lady Diana's death in August 1997, the film shows the numberplate on the Range Rover as having the new style 'Charles Wright' font, which was introduced in September 2001.
• Reality Subtext:
  • Near the end of the movie, the Queen warns Blair that what happened to her can happen to him as well. It is almost certainly intended as a reference to Blair's Fallen Hero status in the eyes of many people following the Iraq War.
  • Prince Charles' fears of being shot may at first be taken to be an overreaction and irrational fear, until you recall that only a few years later in Sydney, Charles narrowly avoided being assassinated himself by a student republican protester. While the gun only carried blanks, he would have been highly shaken by it nevertheless.
• Throw It In!: Helen Mirren suggested that Elizabeth clean her glasses with her sweater and line up pens while on the phone with Blair, and even got Frears to film an insert shot of the pens, based on childhood behaviors of hers in the tell-all book The Little Princesses by her old nanny.

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