Claire Foy Addresses The Pressures Of Being A ’24-Hours-A-Day Mother’

Claire Foy has admitted she feels the pressure to be a “24-hours-a-day mother” and a “vehicle for entertainment, love and food”.

The Crown star, 37, shares a six-year-old daughter, Ivy Rose, with her ex-partner actor Stephen Campbell Moore.

Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar, she addressed the challenges faced by mothers.

She said:

“There’s this pressure to be this cake-baking, fun, playing 24-hours-a-day mother, being some sort of vehicle for entertainment, love and food.

“I’m just prepared to apologise for who I am: ‘I am so sorry – but you’re lumped with me. This is the hand you’ve been dealt, let’s try to make the best of it.’”

Foy, who will receive the actress prize at the Harper’s Bazaar Women of the Year Awards on Tuesday night, also dismissed the idea she would avoid playing the part of someone’s wife on screen.

She said:

“It’s to underestimate the fact that women have, for centuries, been wives and mothers, and still are. That’s denying our entire history of what it means to be a woman.

“I’m interested in what she’s doing, what she thinks, what she believes. I don’t ever want to say I’m never playing a part that is supporting, or someone’s wife, because they exist, and if you can give them a voice, you should, instead of just making all these female characters that are basically just men but look like women – the superhero women who can fly, punch men in the face, that sort of stuff.”

Foy, who played the Queen in Netflix’s lavish royal drama The Crown, described the relationship between the monarch and her late husband the Duke of Edinburgh as “so beautiful”.

However, she refused to speculate as to how the Queen must feel following his death in April, saying she had always played show creator Peter Morgan’s “fictionalised version of who he thought was the Queen”.

“I knew I would have to have attachments and beliefs about who that character was, but what right have I got to assume any sort of connection to her or ownership of her?” Foy said.

“But they were married for such a long time, and there is something so beautiful about their commitment to one another.”

The December issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK is on sale from November 5.