The Crown actress Claire Foy is set to star in another prestige period drama — but she’ll be playing a character who couldn’t be more different from the Queen. The BBC has revealed the first look images at A Very British Scandal, a new miniseries that’ll feature Foy in the lead opposite WandaVision‘s Paul Bettany.
This three-parter is effectively the second season of 2018’s A Very English Scandal, which starred Hugh Grant as a closeted gay politician whose affair with Ben Whishaw’s stable boy rocked the UK media in the 1970s. This follow-up will dramatize one of the nation’s biggest scandals in the 1960s — a messy divorce between a duke (Bettany) and his adulterous socialite wife (Foy), who the press dubbed “The Dirty Duchess”.
A Very British Scandal follows the couple’s sensational divorce trial, which came about after the Duke of Argylle discovered dozens of nude polaroid photos of his wife, Margaret Campbell, having sex with another man, whose head was cropped out of frame and never formally revealed. The Duke claimed in court that his wife slept with 88 men during their marriage and she was declared a “completely promiscuous woman” by the judge.
Obviously, attitudes have changed a lot since then and the series is set to reflect that, depicting Margaret as someone “punished for being a woman, for being visible, for refusing to back down, be a good girl and go quietly,” said screenwriter Sarah Phelps. “This drama is my tribute to her.” You can find the first images of Foy and Bettany as the Duke and Duchess (via Vogue) in the gallery above.
A Very British Scandal is set to premiere on BBC One in the UK later this year before streaming on Amazon Prime Video in the US sometime in 2022. Claire Foy will next be seen in Benedict Cumberbatch’s film The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, which hits Prime on November 5th.