Olivia Colman is not usually the kind of actress who buries herself in character research. An acute empath, she can read a script—like she did for The Favourite, in which she plays Queen Anne—and summon a 3-D emotional scan of her character. But gearing up to play Queen Elizabeth II on the next two seasons of The Crown required a different approach.

In a conversation about The Favourite for Vanity Fair’s special-issue cover story, Colman obliged our questions about The Crown, dropping a few clues about her preparation and various season-three storylines.

“My Dropbox couldn’t cope with the amounts of stuff their research department sent,” Colman said, explaining that Queen Elizabeth poses a higher-stakes challenge than Queen Anne because everyone knows what Elizabeth looks and sounds like, and everyone “is in love with Claire Foy”—who played Elizabeth on The Crown’s first two seasons—“including me.” To prepare, Colman has been studying archival footage of the monarch. “You watch her move and how her movements change. . . . The way she holds her handbag. . . . I’m still not very good at physical copying. One of the directors kept shouting, ‘Queen, not farmer.’ So I’ll keep trying.”

Colman has already faced certain obstacles that her predecessor, in the role, Claire Foy, was able to avoid—like re-creating Queen Elizabeth’s fluency in French during scenes depicting the Queen’s 1972 state visit to France. That five-day visit marked Britain’s entry into the Common Market, and included a state dinner hosted by President Georges Pompidou at Versailles. During the trip, the monarch was able to pay a final visit to her “Uncle David,” the Duke of Windsor, whose 1936 abdication thrust Elizabeth in line for the throne. (The two shared a 15-minute private conversation in his Paris home—a scene which will hopefully be re-created by The Crown mastermind Peter Morgan.)

Fortunately for Colman, she had a co-star—Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Princess Margaret—who was willing to help.

“I’m all right with French from school, but her accent is impeccable. So I asked her to record [my dialogue],” said Colman, revealing that Carter sent her homemade video tutorials. “She took the job so seriously. She did it so I could see her face, and then I got some voice recordings as well, where she would start from the beginning. If it was a tricky word, she’d say it again, nice and slowly, like she was the voice department. . . . She’s a really extraordinary woman. She’s so warm and so sort of embracing of everything, and she’s lovely. I’m really very lucky to spend my days with her.”

Colman revealed that Elizabeth and Margaret’s relationship is on steadier ground in Season 3. “They have to come to blows, but they’re sort of the only ones who know each other that well and the only ones that each other can really trust,” said Colman. “[Elizabeth and Margaret] did everything together as children—they were taught in the same room, slept in the same room, everything. They saw the world from the same windows. Then they just get foisted into these positions that they didn’t really want.”

Margaret’s ire is instead directed more towards her husband, Lord Snowdon—but Elizabeth’s marriage to Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies) will also smooth out, according to Colman. “I think they’ve gone into a much steadier phase in the 1960s. They’re older, more mature,” she said. This is not the first time that Colman and Menzies have shared scenes—the duo co-starred in The Night Manager, and met through a mutual friend years before. “We’d been in the pub and pissed together a few times. He’s so brilliant.”