The queen’s got moves! Olivia Colman asked the cast of The Crown to join her in a choreographed dance routine to Lizzo’s “Good as Hell” on set — and believe it or not, they obliged.
“Olivia apparently does a dance class — in the area that she lives with a bunch of friends — on a regular basis. And the last time she did the class, they had danced to that song,” Gillian Anderson, who played Margaret Thatcher in season 4 of the Netflix historical drama, said on Late Night With Seth Meyers on Wednesday, January 27. “She asked if we would happen to be interested in maybe doing it.”
After some convincing, cast members including Tobias Menzies, Helena Bonham Carter, Josh O’Connor and Anderson, 52, confirmed that they were on board.
“[Olivia said] she would video it, and then she would just share it only with her friends, the other dancers,” the X Files alum recalled. “It was never meant to see the light of day.”
Well, so much for that. With a sly laugh, Seth Meyers cued up the video, which was recorded between takes of a funeral scene, and played it for his late-night viewers.
In the hilarious clip, Colman, 46, enthusiastically busted a move in her Queen Elizabeth II costume as Menzies, also 46, Bonham Carter, 54, O’Connor, 30, Marion Bailey, Erin Doherty and other costars followed her lead. They ended the dance with a perfectly in-sync glide to the right (“Cha Cha Slide” style) and a collective “Woo!”
Meyers, 47, called the choreography “really good,” but Anderson was visibly mortified.
“So humiliating,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean, that look on my face. I don’t even know. There’s such delight and shame all at once.”
The TV host tried to lighten the mood, telling the Chicago-born actress that she “did a better job than Margaret Thatcher would have done.” He also acknowledged that it was “a pretty low bar,” however.
Anderson only played the late British prime minister in one season of the streaming hit, but she had a blast doing so. She shared several photos and videos with her castmates via Instagram and Twitter in 2020 as they enjoyed some rare downtime on set. In one particularly funny video that she tweeted in December, Colman reversed her car out of ditch while looking like the spitting image of the queen.
The Crown is now streaming on Netflix.
