Tobias Menzies confirmed to play Prince Philip to Olivia Colman's Queen in The Crown

Weeks after announcing that Olivia Colman will take over from Claire Foy to play Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, Netflix have confirmed that Tobias Menzies will join the cast as Prince Philip.

Menzies, who has won a following among fantasy television fans for playing Jonathan "Black Jack" Randall in Outlander and Edmure Tully in Game of Thrones, will replace Matt Smith for season three of The Crown. 

Netflix confirmed the casting to USA Today on Wednesday night. 

Menzies, a Londoner, was not the first choice to take on the Duke of Edinburgh. Iron Man actor Paul Bettany was signed up for the role, but pulled out earlier this year after being unable to commit to eight months of filming in the UK. Bettany, who is English, lives in Brooklyn with his wife Jennifer Connolly and their two children. 

It's unclear when Menzies was approached by Netflix, but the actor hinted that we wouldn't be seeing Edmure Tully in the final series of Game of Thrones. Last week, he told Digital Spy that his character was: “obviously somewhere in a prison, he’s still around alive somewhere... I feel like they have so many stories to tie-up, whether that’s a story they’ll want to go back to, I don’t know.”

Series three of The Crown will pick up in the early 1970s, where the second left off, and introduce a young Camilla Shand, who met Prince Charles at a polo match in 1971 and later became Camilla Parker Bowles. It's also expected that, along with Charles, more will be seen of Anne's life than in earlier series. The following fourth series will reportedly take viewers up to the 1980s, complete with the arrival of Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher and the IRA assassination of Lord Mountbatten.

The Crown's casting directors have stressed the complexities of choosing the right actors to play the royals as the drama continues. “Not only are we casting real-life characters,” casting director Nina Gold told Vanity Fair in February, “but as we get closer to the present day, many of these people are very much alive. So we have to honour them by picking the right actor to play them – while making a link between the actors who played these characters in the first seasons.”

The Crown cast and characters

Gold is, however, familiar with Menzies, having cast him in Game of Thrones. The role of Prince Philip will be a departure from Menzies' best-known role, as the villainous aristocrat Captain Randall in time-travelling period fantasy Outlander. Randall is an imperious and charming baddie, who has been shown to assault women, instill fear into the men he commands and is described as Outlander's creator as a "sadistic bisexual pervert".

The time-travelling structure of Outlander, though, means that Menzies also plays Frank, a quiet and devoted husband to Claire (played by Caitriona Balfe). Both men, Menzies said in a 2014 interview, have been changed by combat: "Jack isn't just a sociopath, someone who just behaves incredibly unpleasantly. We get to see someone who is shaped his experience of war."

At least three more new actors remain unrevealed: “Charles, Camilla, and Anne are going to be pretty interesting characters to follow, because they are just coming into their own,” Gold said. “We’ve cast a pretty wide net for these new young characters.”

Menzies' co-stars wasted no time in congratulating the actor. Balfe shared her congratulations on Twitter, saying: "So excited for you and so excited to see this!", along with the show's production designer Jon Gary Steele. 

Neither Colman nor Menzies have publicly commented on the news.