Claire Foy returns to The Graham Norton Show this week to discuss her upcoming miniseries A Very British Scandal and role opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in the historical movie The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. To whet your appetite, here are a few things you might not know about the Emmy-winning star of The Crown.
1. She comes from a "massive Irish family" on her mother's side – her Irish grandparents emigrated to the U.K. and made a real success of it.
"Coming to London where the Irish were completely stigmatized… they just worked themselves to the bone – six kids in a two up, two down [terrace house]," Foy told Irish Central. "And then suddenly my mum – the eldest – went to university and you think 'crikey, that's not many generations from real working class to everyone being middle class and having a lovely time.' It's a real testament to them. You just hope you can enforce that with your own kids. Not everybody goes to a French villa on their holidays."
2. She has suffered from anxiety since she was a child, but says it "exploded" when she became an actress.
Foy told The Guardian in 2018 that for a long time she used anxiety as "a tool to survive" and to "try to feel safe." Happily, she also said her symptoms had "plateaued " since she underwent therapy.
"It's still there, but I guess I don't believe it so much any more," she added. "I used to think that this was my lot in life, to be anxious. And that I would struggle and struggle and struggle with it, and that it would make me quite miserable, and that I'd always be restricted. But now I'm able to disassociate myself from it more."
3. She once bonded with a drunk The Crown fan in a fish and chip shop.
During a previous appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Foy shared the sweet story of how the two women hugged and chatted while their cod was being battered. It's a "peak British" moment.
4. Her screen debut came in the pilot episode of BBC America's cult series Being Human.
She plays Janet, the former fiancée of Russell Tovey's werewolf George.You can refresh your memory with some screenshots here. 
5. She had a pretty tough time in high school.
“Feeling stupid is not a nice thing. I wasn’t really good at anything. I was relatively good at home economics, at making cakes, and was quite sporty," Foy told the Wall Street Journal Magazine. “But I had juvenile arthritis from the ages of 12 to 15, so I was on crutches. It was extremely painful."
6. When she was 17, she developed a benign tumor in one eye.
"I was like a Cyclops and it was all a bit scary," Foy told The Independent. "And I was on steroids for about a year and a half afterwards that makes you put on a lot of weight and have really bad skin. It's quite good when you have something like that, because the amount of time you've got to look in a mirror when you're working... the amount of time people talk about your face... It's quite good to have some sort of perspective, because it's just a face."
7. She's a lifelong fan of Bruce Springsteen.
Foy told Artist Direct that her favorite songs by The Boss are "Secret Garden," "Dancing in the Dark," and his live version of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town."
8. After her 2018 movies First Man and The Girl in the Spider's Web, she made a conscious decision to take around three years off work.
“I couldn’t keep going job after job,” she told The Times last month. “It was going to get boring.” 
Asked for whom it could become “boring,” Foy replied: “Everybody! At some point somebody will say, ‘We don’t care about you any more.’ And boring for me too — I was quite jaded. I turned down work and it’s not like I had sh**loads of money. I was exhausted, at the end of my rope with lots of stuff and just went, ‘Goodbye! I can’t do this any more.’”
9. She says filming sex scenes is "the grimmest thing you can do."
“It’s a really hard line because basically you do feel exploited when you are a woman and you are having to perform fake sex on screen. You can’t help but feel exploited," Foy said during a recent appearance on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. 
She also explained why she agreed to film sex scenes for her upcoming miniseries A Very British Scandal, in which she plays Margaret Campbell, the Duchess of Argyll, an aristocratic woman who was slut-shamed by the British media in the 1960s. "My thing was that I felt very strongly that it had to be in it, but I wanted it to be female," said Foy, who is also a producer on the series. "I did not want it to be that sort of awful climactic sexual experience you often see on the cinema screen."
10. But she really loves fight scenes.
Foy shared her passion for the physical side of acting during a previous appearance on The Graham Norton Show. You can catch her on this week's episode Friday (January 7) at 11pm on BBC America.
Have we left out something unexpected or interesting about Claire Foy?