Times, actors are changing as ‘The Crown’ enters 1960s, ’70s

“The Crown” opens with a clever acknowledgment that time has passed for Queen Elizabeth II and taken with it the Emmy-winning actress who played her in the Netflix drama’s first two seasons.

In the scene, postage stamp portraits are displayed for the monarch: one with Claire Foy’s likeness as the alluring young queen, the other showing a woman edging toward middle-age mundanity. A subordinate clumsily tries to gloss over the physical differences, but Elizabeth, now embodied by Olivia Colman, will have none of it.

“One just has to get on with it,” she says, tartly, advice for herself and the audience that will meet other series newcomers, including Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret and Tobias Menzies as royal spouse Prince Philip, when the 10-episode third season is released Sunday. Josh O'Connor and Erin Doherty join the cast as Charles and Anne, the grown offspring of Elizabeth and Philip.

In this image released by Netflix, Olivia Colman portrays Queen Elizabeth II in a scene from the third season of "The Crown," debuting Sunday on Netflix. (Sophie MutevelianNetflix via AP)

Peter Morgan, the series’ creator and writer, said transparency was the proper approach.

"I thought, let's just get it out in the open. It's always best to, as it were, be honest and direct about it: We’re changing cast. This is the new one," he said in a phone interview from London this week, with production for next season’s episodes in progress.

There’s change as well in swinging 1960s Britain, where this season of “The Crown” begins with the Labour Party narrowly winning power and Harold Wilson (Jason Watkins) installed as prime minister. Cold War rumors that Wilson is a Soviet spy are feverishly circulating, a reminder that the spread of dubious information predates the internet. When the allegation reaches the queen via Philip, she sensibly asks the source. His nonchalant reply: “Friends at the club.”

In this image released by Netflix, Tobias Menzies portrays Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in a scene from the third season of "The Crown," debuting Sunday on Netflix. (Des WillieNetflix via AP)

Current events echo elsewhere in “The Crown,” including frustration over economic disparity that exposes the monarchy’s expensive upkeep to criticism, and fraying international relations, particularly between Britain and the United States under President Lyndon B. Johnson (the explanation offered: Johnson is peeved over Wilson’s refusal to support his Vietnam policy). The season ends in the late 1970s.

Morgan said he wasn’t “engineering” parallels between then and now, but realistically depicting a “country really at its own throat” during that period.

"You have the left and the right screaming at each other, and not hearing and not listening to one another,” Morgan said. “In a funny way, it was reassuring because what the show has continually reminded me of, again and again and again, is that crisis is the default position rather than harmony. But we project a harmony into the past."

In this image released by Netflix, Marion Bailey portrays Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, left, and Helena Bonham Carter portrays Princess Margaret in a scene from the third season of "The Crown," debuting Sunday on Netflix. (Des WillieNetflix via AP)

The series artfully weaves together the political and personal. There’s a tender scene in which Elizabeth visits a frail Winston Churchill (John Lithgow, who won a 2017 Emmy for the role); a wrenching disaster that tests the queen’s capacity to serve as comforter-in-chief, and a national economic crisis that gives second-fiddle Margaret a chance to shine.

Morgan is an esteemed chronicler of authority and privilege, earning Academy Award screenwriting nominations for “Frost/Nixon,” about journalist David Frost’s TV interviews with former U.S. President Richard Nixon, and “The Queen,” featuring Helen Mirren’s Oscar-winning performance as the monarch grappling with the repercussions of Princess Diana’s death. In 2017, Morgan earned the British Film Institute’s highest honor, the BFI Fellowship.

Ben Caron, an executive producer and director for “The Crown,” called Morgan’s writing “the very best of the best.”

In this image released by Netflix, Josh O'Connor portrays Prince Charles in a scene from the third season of "The Crown," debuting Sunday on Netflix. (Des WillieNetflix via AP)

“But the edit is when Peter’s innate understanding of his own material comes into play. He is brutal with his own work — cutting out whole scenes, speeches, moments — in order to refine, refine, refine,” Caron said in an email. “It’s a writer's instinct as much as a filmmaker’s, this whole idea of, ‘Why use 10 words when you can use one?' It often means we lose a lot in the edit, scenes that we’ve slaved over, beautifully shot work, prized moments, but his instincts are always, always right.”

Morgan said he’s become comfortable with dramatizing the famous, but admits that finding his approach to the modern genre wasn’t easy. His breakthrough came on “The Deal,” a British TV movie about Labour colleagues and rivals Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

"The really big leap of terror for me happened in 2003, really when I first started writing Tony Blair in a serious way and broke with the tradition of only dealing with political figures and our leaders through satire,” instead creating fully realized individuals, he said.

In this image released by Netflix, Erin Doherty portrays Princess Anne in a scene from the third season of "The Crown," debuting Sunday on Netflix. (Des WillieNetflix via AP)

Morgan doesn’t mingle with the royal family, but he did have a brief encounter with Prince Charles in 2015, when the heir to the throne invested him, among some 80 others, as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire — in Morgan’s case, an honor recognizing his services to drama.

“So you’re a scriptwriter?” Charles asked him, adding his view that what a writer chooses to leave out is more important than what’s included — a comment that Morgan says he didn’t take as a veiled message (it was, to be fair, before “The Crown” had debuted, but after “The Queen” had taken a hard look at the House of Windsor).

"I don't think he had the faintest idea who I was,” Morgan said, matter-of-factly. “I think he would have been far more excited and far more interested to meet people involved in conservation, or farming or even in science and invention. It’s hard to imagine, for those of us in London, New York or Los Angeles, but there’s a huge world out there that doesn’t give a (expletive) about what we do.”

“The Crown” has proven compelling to audiences and, although Netflix doesn’t release ratings, Morgan happily noted that views have jumped for this season’s preview trailer. He’s mulled both viewer dedication to the series and his own (“Why am I still doing this?”) and concluded part of the answer is the canvas it offers to examine the latter half of the 20th century.

“On the one hand, you’re looking at history and you’re looking at a family and you’re looking at the British constitution. But because these people are such strong connective tissue ... you’re also looking at your grandfather, your grandmother, your father, your mother, your own childhood and your children’s childhood,” he said.

He hadn’t foreseen that the series “would be the story of our lives,” he said, invoking Warren Buffett’s name and economics to bolster his resolve to stick with “The Crown” to its end, whenever that may come.

“In a funny way, I think it’s important that I carry on doing, because it’s a bit like compound interest,” Morgan said. “It becomes more profound the more of it there is.”

Lynn Elber is at lelber@ap.org and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lynnelber

NEW YORK (AP) — Google said Sunday that it is expanding the shopping features in its AI chatbot by teaming up with Walmart, Shopify, Wayfair and other big retailers to turn the Gemini app into a virtual merchant as well as an assistant.

An instant checkout function will allow customers to make purchases from some businesses and through a range of payment providers without leaving the Gemini chat they used to find products, according to Walmart and Google.

The news was announced on the first day of the National Retail Federation’s annual convention in New York, which is expected to draw 40,000 attendees from retailer and technology companies this week. The role of artificial intelligence in e-commerce and its impact on consumer behavior are expected to dominate the three-day event.

“The transition from traditional web or app search to agent-led commerce represents the next great evolution in retail," John Furner, Walmart's incoming president and CEO, said in a joint statement with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichaei.

Google’s new AI shopping feature works this way: if a customer asks what gear to get for a winter ski trip, for example, Gemini will return items from a participating retailers’ inventory.

In the case of Walmart, customers who link their Walmart and Gemini accounts will receive recommendations based on their past purchases, and any products they decide to buy via the chatbot could get combined with their existing Walmart or Sam's Club online shopping carts, according to the statement.

OpenAI and Walmart announced a similar deal in October, saying the partnership would allow ChatGPT members to use an instant checkout feature to shop for nearly everything available on Walmart’s website except for fresh food.

Google, OpenAI and Amazon all are racing to create tools that would allow for seamless AI-powered shopping by taking chatbot users from browsing to buying within the same program instead of having to go to a retailer’s website to complete a purchase. The race between OpenAI and Google has heated up in recent months.

Before the recent holiday shopping season, OpenAI launched an instant checkout feature within ChatGPT that allows users to buy products from select retailers and Etsy sellers without leaving the app.

San Francisco software company Salesforce estimated that AI influenced $272 billion, or 20%, of all global retail sales, in one way or another during the holiday shopping season.

Google said the AI-assisted shopping features in Gemini only would be available to U.S. users initially but that it planned to expand internationally in the coming months. Shoppers initially only can make payments through the cards linked to their Google accounts but soon will be able to make purchases using PayPal, the company said.

The aim of deploying chatbots in e-commerce is to make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for. Instead of entering search terms and keywords, they can type or use voice dictation, and refine their searches through a conversational back-and-forth. Tech companies also are rolling out “AI agents” that are a step beyond today's generative AI chatbots, though their ability to buy products on behalf of consumers is still limited.

“I’m under no false belief that there’s going to be a snap of the finger and then all of a sudden, agentic commerce is going to get everywhere," Mike Edmonds, PayPal's vice president of agentic commerce and commercial growth, said at Sunday's convention. But he cautioned retailers against taking a wait-and-see approach.

Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lutke told a small group of reporters on Thursday that many people like the experience of “having a personal shopper who really gets them, understands them and can fit something in your budget," but Shopify also wants to make it doesn't “over automate."

“The person, the shopper, is in charge, and they can make the final call, but also we make it so that people find the perfect product for themselves,” he added.

Walmart's Furner said Sunday that the largest employer and retailer in the U.S. is trying to “close the gap between I want it and I have it” with the help of AI.

He and Pichaei announced from a stage at the National Retail Federation conference that Walmart plans to expand drone delivery service to 150 more stores in partnership with Wing, a division of Alphabet. The addition will bring Walmart's drone delivery locations with Wing to 270 by 2027, stretching from Los Angeles to Miami, the companies said.

FILE - Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, Calif., Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)