The Crown: Tobias Menzies says he is happy to be paid less than Olivia Colman

The makers of The Crown have reversed the gender pay gap by giving Olivia Colman more money for her role as the Queen than Tobias Menzies receives for playing the Duke of Edinburgh.

There was outrage last year when it emerged that Colman’s predecessor, Claire Foy, was paid less than her on-screen husband, Matt Smith.

“Going forward, no one gets paid more than the Queen,” the producers of the Netflix show said when the gap was revealed, and they have stayed true to their word.

“My understanding is that, this time around, I’m paid less than Olivia,” Menzies disclosed in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar.

“Of course I think that feels proportionate because Olivia is much more established than me and has a much higher profile that she’s bringing to the show and the product.”

Menzies said the disparity between Foy and Smith was “hard to swallow” because Foy’s role was more important. He added: “They got there in the end, I suppose.”

Foy was reported to have been given £210,000 in back pay after the pay gap was made public, although she later said the report was “not quite correct”.

In a separate interview, Peter Morgan, The Crown’s scriptwriter, explained that he re-cast the series rather than ‘age up’ Foy and Smith because young actors cannot understand what it is to be middle-aged.

“The choice was simple. You either go with putting a whole lot of make-up or prosthetics on somebody, or you say, ‘Look, it’s ridiculous - you can’t ask someone in their late 20s to play someone who’s 50, and really understand it,” Morgan told The Crown’s companion podcast.

“You can put lines on someone’s face and maybe even digitally age them, but you can’t beat the fatigue of life and the bruises of life into a face.”

Morgan said Colman was the perfect casting because she is an “everywoman”. “The Queen manages to be both the grandest woman in the country and yet entirely approachable, it seems. Olivia has something of that.”

But he admitted that he may not have drawn an accurate portrait of the real Queen. “I’ve spent no time with these people. None. I don’t really want to,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ve got her right. I’m just guessing. It’s like well-intentioned, well-informed guessing.”