Claire Foy is finished playing Queen Elizabeth on The Crown—Olivia Colman will take on the role as the series jumps forward in time when it returns to Netflix this spring—and she’s well aware that her career has changed a “massive amount” since she first got the role. But her life, she insists, is truly the same. “My life has continued as it always has, nothing to be changed,” she told Vanity Fair’s executive West Coast editor, Krista Smith, in a conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I realized I’m still doing the same job I was doing for 10 years, it’s just in a different scale.”

And given how transformative the role was, with its 60s hairstyles and prim clothing, Foy isn’t facing the same privacy-invading problems of other famous people. “People don’t really stop me in the street and things like that,” she said. Would they stop her if she was in full-on Queen Elizabeth costume? “They would think I was a Queen impersonator, not the person who played the Queen.”

It helps, Foy said, that she still lives in England, where enthusiasm about The Crown is just as high, but kept more private. “In the U.S., you’re just better at loving things anyway. We don’t want to be too over-enthused, and we don’t want to make us feel too great about ourselves. But in the U.S., you do it so well.”

Foy got used to some of that American energy for her new role in First Man, about astronaut Neil Armstrong and the years of work—and crushing failure—that had to happen before he became the first person to walk on the moon in 1969. Foy plays Armstrong’s wife, Janet, who stood by him through both the brutal astronaut-training process and several heartbreaking personal tragedies. “I learned about Janet, how matter-of-fact she was, and how life throws things at you [and] you pick yourself up and carry on,“ Foy said. “It’s a very kind of midwestern way of value, I suppose. It was amazing.”