15 Fascinating Facts About Victoria

While The Crown may nab the bigger headlines, Victoria—the Masterpiece series that similarly follows a young-and-not-quite-ready royal’s ascension to England’s throne—beat Netflix’s pricey TV series to the air by more than two months. Though it was originally intended as a one-off miniseries, the show—about the early days of Queen Victoria’s reign—just kicked off its third season. To celebrate, we've gathered up some behind-the-scenes facts about the gorgeous, Buckingham Palace-set period piece.

1. Jenna Coleman left Doctor Who to take the lead in Victoria.

In 2015, Jenna Coleman surprised Whovians everywhere when she announced that she was leaving Doctor Who after three years on the series, where she served as a companion to both the Eleventh (Matt Smith) and Twelfth (Peter Capaldi) Doctors. Almost as soon as her departure from Doctor Who was confirmed, her casting as the lead in Victoria was announced. Not long after Coleman made her debut as Queen Victoria, her former Doctor Who co-star, Matt Smith, began his two-year stint as Prince Philip on The Crown.

2. Game of Thrones’s Emilia Clarke was among the actresses rumored to be vying for the lead role.

Victoria was originally meant to air as a single eight-part miniseries (its popularity is what led to a second season … and then a third). Because the time commitment wasn’t so intense, a number of well-known actors’ names were being tossed around as potential stars for the project. Among them? Game of Thrones’s Emilia Clarke and Downton Abbey’s Lily James.

3. Coleman was given access to Queen Victoria’s personal diaries.

In order to better help her get into the mindset of her character, Coleman was given access to Victoria’s private diaries. “I’ve read so many biographies, but I’m always looking for certain details which give me access to her character and her psychology,” Coleman told Vulture in 2017. “Her diaries are so methodological in a lot of ways. You can find out what she ate for breakfast and what time she did this and what time she rose and what time she did everything. The detail is crazy.”

4. Queen Victoria was an avid sketcher, which was enormously helpful to Coleman.

In addition to writing down even the most mundane details of her day, Victoria was an avid sketcher. Gaining access to the Queen's doodles gave Coleman an even deeper insight into Victoria's mind. “She sketched and had done watercolors since she was about five or six years old,” Coleman told Vulture. “You can see what she used to draw and what interested her from a really young age, and that probably gave me the best sense of her psyche. It’s been totally untouched. Nobody has been able to distort her views with her own eyes and her hands. It’s unfiltered in every way so they’re really, really interesting.” (You can see some of those sketches for yourself here.)

5. Queen Victoria and Lord Melbourne's relationship was complicated.

Victoria’s relationship with Lord Melbourne (played by Rufus Sewell) is one of the series’ most dynamic and touching. And while it plays out as somewhat of one-sided love affair in season one, the truth wasn’t quite as romantic. Though she was sometimes referred to as “Mrs. Melbourne” in a mocking manner because of the prime minister's influence over the young queen, their relationship was more like a parental one.

“What’s so wonderful about Lord M and Victoria’s relationship is that it was the prime minister and the queen. It was dear friends,” Coleman told Vulture. “She was 18; he was technically 56 at the time. They made each other laugh. They were like father and daughter in many, many ways. You really can’t quite put a label on it, other than it’s two people who really connect and charm each other through mutual likes and interests. They had a really profound love, but what that love technically was is unclear … I think he was the first person who didn’t try to manipulate her and didn’t try to control her. He really gave her a voice so the trust between them was genuine and two-way. They went through a lot together. He was the person who guided her and shaped her and trained her for the first couple of years on the throne."

6. Keeping the child actors entertained can be a challenge.

Over the course of their marriage, Victoria and Albert had nine children together. So as the series has gone on, the number of babies and children on set has grown. Writing for Marie Claire, series creator Daisy Goodwin admitted that keeping the youngsters entertained can require some creative solutions:

"One of the tricks we use is to dress their mothers up as nursemaids to keep them right at their side—but sometimes the kids just won’t play ball. In one episode, Victoria comes home after a trip to Scotland and rushes in all excited to see the children, but they didn’t even turn round to look at her. A bag of sweets later, we got them at least to look up when their 'Mother' walked in."

7. Coleman likes playing a pregnant Queen best.

Queen Victoria famously loathed being pregnant, which we witness in the series. She “absolutely hated it,” Coleman told Town & Country. “She called it ‘being caught’ … [E]very time she gave birth to a child, it took her out of being able to be Queen. Each time that happened, she was being more and more and more removed. And she’s an impatient person; she doesn’t like being told to lie down. She just wanted to do her job. She had this exhilaration and love for her independence, I suppose. And she hated breastfeeding; she thought it was for cows, not for humans. So a lot of the things that came with her being a mother, she found pretty vile, I think."

Coleman feels quite differently about Victoria’s pregnancies—or at least about playing a pregnant Queen. “I think I enjoy playing her most when she’s pregnant because one, I don’t have to wear a corset, but then two, I get to kind of waddle around, and I feel like she can just be foul-tempered and rude,” Coleman said. “I relish playing her when she’s like that because she doesn’t really care what anybody thinks, in a way. She does when it comes to the public and her people, but ultimately, you get free reign to play Victoria irritable and in a bad mood, and I really love playing her when she’s like that."

8. The child actors have “no respect” for Victoria, according to Coleman.

When asked about what it’s like working with a handful of kids on a regular basis, Coleman described it as both “absolutely crazy” and “hilarious.” Especially because the children are too young to understand what it means to stay in character. “Imagine toddlers, and you put them on set, and you kind of just have to get what you can,” Coleman said of shooting with her onscreen kids. “It's unpredictable, and incredibly funny because kids do say the funniest things, and they say the funniest things during takes. They ask Queen Victoria for some Doritos. It just becomes chaos, and I just absolutely get the giggles. They should release some footage of what really happens when the kids come to set. There’s no respect to Victoria. They completely rule me."

9. Buckingham Palace is actually an old airplane hangar.

Much of the series takes place at Buckingham Palace, and the show’s production team has done an amazing job of recreating the splendor of the property and what it would have looked like during Victoria’s reign. The location of their set, however, is not quite so glamorous. “The set where we film the Buckingham Palace scenes is in an old aircraft hangar, and is home to all kinds of wildlife,” according to Goodwin. “We had to stop shooting a very tender scene between Victoria and Albert because an owl kept flying through the frame, attracted by the jewels in Victoria’s hair."

10. Lighting all those candles is no easy task.

Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, at about the same time that candlelight was being replaced with gas light in some of London’s most stately properties. While the switch to gas lighting has its own storyline in the series (there are rats involved), there were still a lot of candles to be lit on the set—about 300 in total. According to Goodwin, the process of lighting all those candles took an hour each time they shot.

11. The dog that plays Dash is no stranger to playing Dash.

The adorable Cavalier King Charles Spaniel that plays the Queen’s most trusted BFF Dash has some experience with the role. “The dog who played Dash is actually called Tory, and she made her screen debut playing the same role in the film Young Victoria starring Emily Blunt,” Goodwin wrote for Marie Claire.

12. A bird played an unanticipated role in Victoria and Albert’s proposal scene.

Much like Victoria herself, some viewers were surprised to learn that when a Queen decides it’s time to tie the knot, she must be the one who proposes. Making the scene in which Victoria proposes to Albert even more awkward and difficult was the fact that an uninvited bird kept interrupting the production.

"The proposal, on paper it looked like a great scene but to film it was a nightmare,” Tom Hughes, who plays Prince Albert, admitted at a screening of the episode. “[It took] about 50 [takes] because there was a stray bird upstairs in the roof. Every time I got to the point where I say, ‘I have to kiss you first’, [the bird] thought that it was the most hilarious line it had ever heard. It was making a variety of all different noises, so that was the tough scene to film."

13. Prince Albert could be the next James Bond.

At this point, there are a handful of actors who have been rumored to be “the next James Bond,” and Hughes is one of them. The actor reportedly caught the attention of James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli after playing an MI5 operative in 2014 BBC miniseries The Game. When asked about his thoughts on taking on the iconic 007 role, Hughes responded: “Would I like to be James Bond? There’s not many people who wouldn’t want to be James Bond.” Though he made it clear that he had not been approached about the role, he stated that “I’d love them to ask."

14. The Duchess of Buccleuch was not so outspoken in real life.

In season two, the legendary Diana Rigg (who played Emma Peel in The Avengers TV series back in the day, and Game of Thrones’s Olenna Tyrell more recently) joined the cast of Victoria as the Duchess of Buccleuch, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Though audiences love the character for her outspokenness, the real-life Duchess—who served as the Queen’s Mistress of the Robes from 1841 to 1846—was not quite so frank. “The real Duchess of Buccleuch was younger and not quite as cantankerous as Diana Rigg’s portrayal,” Goodwin said. “[But] when you’ve got Diana Rigg, you go with that!"

15. Albert’s imminent death is coming, and it’s a bit of dark cloud.

Prince Albert died in 1861 at the age of 42. While the official cause of death was typhoid fever, modern scholars believe that he may have been suffering from Crohn’s disease or abdominal cancer. Knowing that Victoria and Albert’s time is limited is a fact that the cast can’t ignore. When asked whether knowing how this story ends ever affects her performance or how she approaches the character, Coleman admitted that it does. “I think everyone knows it’s coming, and it’s really interesting because Tom [Hughes] and I look a bit older in this series, and we’re so many children in,” she told Town & Country. "You kind of have that creeping feeling, but we still have an amazing part of the story to tell."