Here’s ‘The Crown’ Season 5 Release Date And New Cast, As It Surges 800% On Netflix

The Crown is skyrocketing in popularity in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death, ascending to #4 in the Netflix Top 10 charts and with viewership up 800% over the course of the last week.

With four seasons of The Crown released, viewers are reaching the end and no doubt wondering when it’s returning. Well, it’s coming back in a pretty timely fashion for its fifth season, and production was briefly paused on its sixth and final season in the wake of the Queen’s death.

The Crown season 5’s release date is November 2022, just two months away, though we do not have an exact date yet, only that month.

These final two seasons will once again recast almost all major roles with new actors as the show moves through the different era’s of the Queen’s life, and season 5 appears as if it will be about the controversial era of Diana’s split from Charles and her tragic death, events that were covered in the Oscar-winning The Queen, when Helen Mirren starred as Elizabeth.

Here’s the new cast for season 5 and season 6 in this final era:

Queen Elizabeth: Imelda Staunton

Prince Phillip: Jonathan Pryce

Prince Charles: Dominic West

Princess Diana: Elizabeth Debicki

Camilla Parker Bowles: Olivia Williams

John Major: Jonny Lee Miller

Imelda Staunton takes over for Olivia Colman who played the Queen in seasons 3 and 4 and won an Emmy in 2021 for it. Before that, Claire Foy played the Queen in seasons 1 and 2 and also won an Emmy in 2018. You can see a pattern here.

While the showrunner says that The Crown is a “love letter” to Elizabeth, the Royal Family’s opinion of the series has fluctuated over the years, even if at times, it was reported the Queen was a fan of certain bits of it. Now, heading into the Diana years, the series is headed toward deeply painful territory, and we’ll see how it is received in season 5 so close to the Queen’s real-life death. It’s bound to be controversial, I’d imagine.

Probably in the next week or two here, Netflix will give us an actual date for The Crown’s return, but of course they want to give some distance from the event itself. For better or worse, The Crown remains the most comprehensive chronicle of at least how the public views Elizabeth’s life, and we still have two more years to see how it’s cemented in the series.

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