Claire Foy has admitted she left The Crown "for my own sanity".
The 39-year-old actress portrayed a young Queen Elizabeth II alongside Matt Smith, 41, as Prince Philip in the first two seasons of the hit Netflix series about the British Royal Family — for which she won a Golden Globe, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards — and although she didn't go into any further details about her exit, she insists it was the "healthy" thing to do.
"I've got a lot of love for the people who are still doing the show, but for my own sanity, I ended the show when I ended it," she explained to People. "I let it go and moved on and I think that's quite healthy."
Claire's Queen popped up briefly in seasons three and four, after Olivia Colman, 49, took the reins before Imelda Staunton, 67, portrayed the monarch in seasons five and six.
Wonka star Olivia recently admitted that The Crown has become "more uncomfortable" to watch as the show has started getting closer to current times. However, she insisted that she loved her time on the series and praised showrunner Peter Morgan.
"I feel uncomfortable answering questions about whether or not The Crown should have stopped before now because I loved the job. It was a great job. I'm not a spokesperson for the Royal Family, don't know them. I can understand, I can feel that maybe it's too close to home now," she explained on The News Agent podcast.
Praising her predecessor, Olivia continued: "I haven't watched the new ones yet... The first two with Claire [Foy], I particularly loved because they were historical stuff. I'd say, 'I didn't know that.' I loved that. And it has become more uncomfortable, but Peter Morgan writes beautifully, and I had a lovely time doing the job."
The sixth and final season includes the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, who is played by Elizabeth Debicki. The 33-year-old star recently admitted the pressure and "immense responsibility" of portraying Diana's final days "woke us up in the night".
"It's an immense, immense responsibility," she told Entertainment Tonight when asked how seriously they approached the subject matter. "It's difficult to describe, it was something that we thought about, that we carried with us, that woke us up in the night. We tried our very best to do [the story] properly."