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All actors may claim they suffer for their art, but Claire Foy has a greater reason to complain than most.

The actress, who plays the Queen in an upcoming Netflix drama, has disclosed she broke her elbow at a wedding shortly before key scenes, but had to plough on for fear of delaying filming.

Foy, 32, said she had sought the help of a doctor, who drained fluid off her elbow to reduce swelling enough to fit into a wedding dress to shoot at Ely Cathedral.

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The actress was photographed during filming with a blue sling on her left arm, but final scenes see her arm covered by the long-sleeved wedding gown.

She told the Radio Times she had fallen over at a wedding three months into shooting The Crown.

"I wasn't even drunk!” she said. “It was so embarrassing phoning the producer to tell him.

“I had to go back to work because we had these huge scenes to shoot of the Royal Wedding and the Coronation at Ely Cathedral.

“I was in a lot of pain until I went to see this amazing doctor who syringed all the blood off my elbow and reduced the swelling.

“But getting into the costumes was tricky for quite a while.”

The first series of the big-budget Netflix drama follows the Queen from her marriage to Philip Mountbatten in 1947 to the resignation of her first Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, in 1955.

Foy, who previously played Anne Boleyn in the BBC’s Wolf Hall, said her part became more difficult as shooting went on.

"In the first two episodes, before she becomes Queen, I could be a lot freer with my emotions, but as the series goes on she develops an armour in order to cope with her circumstances," she said.

"She has to be a sphinx, which must be so hard. Imagine never being able to shout 'shut up' or cry, even in front of your own family."

Peter Morgan, the writer, said he had initially seen the Queen as an “empty vessel”, but had come to learn “you can tell what she thinks from what she hasn’t said and hasn’t done”.

“I suspect there’s a million times she curses under her breath,” he said. “I imagine her natural sympathies are with the Commonwealth, rather than Europe, and one of the reasons the country was able to contemplate Brexit was because the grandmother of our nation thinks that way.”

He disclosed Netflix had been particularly keen on taking the series, despite interest from the BBC, because it was seeking to expand from 60 countries to 190, many of which were in the Commonwealth where, Morgan said, “the Queen is their grandmother”.

“I hope never to meet her,” the writer said. “I’ve spent so long thinking and writing about the woman it would feel unnatural and uncomfortable. I’d just be embarrassed.”

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