A fake corpse from the hit series Netflix The crown almost sparked a murder investigation, the production designers of the series, which debuts Wednesday with its fifth season, have revealed.

In February of this year, while filming, A group of thieves stole $ 200,000 worth of vintage accessories, contained in two large trucks from the set of the Netflix series. But they dumped a fictitious corpse, which they also found next to the antiques.

Set designer Alison Harvey said Varietywhich is the publication that broke the news, that the prop was mainly related to the sixth episode which examines the relationship between British royalty and Russia.

“It’s a shame because they were some of the finest antiques we could get our hands on as we tried to recreate the Russian imperial family and old Russian wealth,” Harvey said. “So a lot of it got lost, which was very sad. We just put what was missing on set and it was pretty good, but it was a sad moment. “

“I think the funniest thing was that the police treated it like a murder investigation, because one of the dummies was floating upside down in the river near the place where the robbery took place, so they immediately thought: ‘We have a murder.’ But in reality it was just a rubber body, “he added.

Priority

Production designer Martin Childs agreed, explaining, “Finding the antiques wasn’t their priority because (they thought) they had a murder to investigate.”

Episode 6

The episode in question begins with a flashback in which the Russian royal family, the Romanovs, are executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries. The family is gathered from their beds in a barren shack where they are shot. In a later scene, the revolutionaries bury the bodies in a mass grave in the woods. The episode concerns the queen’s request Isabella II Russian leader Boris Elstin to give the family, who was related to her husband Prince Philip, a proper burial.

Harvey said the fake corpse found in the river looked exactly like a real corpse, which is why the police were initially confused. “It was worth £ 13,000 (about fifteen thousand dollars),” he said of the prosthetic body. “He was absolutely identical to a naked dead man. It was probably quite alarming for the police when they took him out. “

With less grace, Childs said the heist was a real blow to the group working on the production. “It was really, really scary,” he said. “But we use mirrors to help us get through it, because the other thing mirrors do is double the amount of stuff you have on set.”

Harvey said some props only survived because a truck got lost en route to the scene. “(I) was not parked where the robbery took place,” she explained. The rest had to be put together to finish putting the set together. “We had some pieces that we brought, we integrated them, but I don’t know if it would have been a better ensemble with those pieces.”

Police did not find any of the stolen items, with Harvey confirming, “None were recovered, no.”