The Crown’s Dominic West and Olivia Williams talk about playing Charles and Camilla, watching the coronation and improvising with omelettes.
Dominic West and Olivia Williams have had plenty of experience playing notable persons over the years, be it Oliver Cromwell, Ernest Hemingway and Richard Burton in his case, Jane Austen, Eleanor Roosevelt and Agatha Christie in hers. Yet the scrutiny increases for every actor when it comes to playing royalty, not least when they have had occasion to meet the very royals they are portraying.
Such was the case for both West and Williams when they were cast as Prince (now King) Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles (now Queen Camilla) in Netflix’s The Crown, people they had met previously through their respective roles as a Prince’s Trust ambassador and a 2016 Booker Prize juror. It was not surprising, then, that Williams felt added pressure to do justice to both Camilla and Peter Morgan’s scripts for the show’s fifth season.
“Having met her, I felt I had a responsibility to show some respect and not disgrace her, or myself,” says Williams. “I feel it’s sort of rude to impersonate someone you’ve been introduced to — though I didn’t know I was going to be impersonating her when I met her, or indeed that she would one day be queen.”
For West, however, any anxieties he felt came from concerns he might not be as credible an heir to the throne as Josh O’Connor, his predecessor on The Crown, who won a Primetime Emmy for playing Prince Charles in 2021. “I thought it wasn’t an easy match and that I was physically not quite right for it,” he admits. “But when I met Peter, he said, ‘You’ll know if you can play him or not,’ and left it up to me. What I found was I couldn’t stop thinking about it and the fascinating life he’s had. I overcame my misgivings that they had maybe miscast and began seeing it as a part I would love to play.” With that resolved, the prospect of meeting Charles again one day is not one that daunts him unduly. “I think it’s unlikely our paths will cross, but it wouldn’t be awkward,” he says. “It comes with the job [of being king], so it’s all grist to the mill for him.”
Finding their feet
Spanning 1991 to 1997, The Crown’s fifth season finds Charles grappling with both the breakdown of his marriage to the-then Princess of Wales (Elizabeth Debicki) and the frustration of being a monarch-in-waiting at the prime of his life. His relationship with the then-married Camilla offers him some succour, yet it also brings down humiliation on both their heads when the intimate contents of a private phone conversation are published.
West remembers the so-called ‘Tampongate’ scandal as being “a squalid episode” when he was in his twenties but sees it much differently 30 years on. “What was squalid was the intrusion. It wasn’t the conversation that was horrible, but the way it had been intruded upon and publicised — that you could call up a number and listen to it, or read a transcript in the papers.”
“The transcript of the conversation and the coverage in the newspapers made it sound like they were getting off on it,” says Williams of an exchange she was required to re‑enact as part of her audition for The Crown. “But I maintained from the very beginning that they were just having a laugh. I believe a huge factor in the king and queen’s relationship is the humour they find in all the events they attend. You may not share their sense of humour, but they seem to delight in each other.”
As it happens, a lot of Williams’ scenes with West in season five took place telephonically — so much so that West felt compelled to broach it with Morgan. “I said to Peter that this very active man was spending an awful lot of time on the phone. So he put in a scene where I was talking on the phone while laying a hedge!”
“We would always rehearse together, talk about the scenes together, and record our phone conversations together,” says Williams. “If we were filming separately, the recording would be played back so we would have the rhythm and patterns of how we responded to each line. Annoyingly, that tended to be when Dominic was filming on a yacht in the south of Spain while I was in a muddy field in Gloucestershire. But there were a few times I was able to be there while he was filming his half of the conversation because my schedule was so much lighter.”
“When we shot those telephone scenes, Olivia would come in and kindly sit in the room with me,” West confirms. “She’s extremely outgoing and dynamic so it was easy to build a rapport.”
Couple 31
In stark contrast, Charles’s lack of rapport with Debicki’s Diana leads to some of season five’s most painful and saddening scenes — among them a meeting at her Kensington Palace apartments shortly after they have made their divorce final. The episode, ‘Couple 31’, is one West remembers with pride and fondness. “You don’t often get the chance to do a scene like that on television. It was a one-act play, really, and we had three days to shoot it. We spent a lot of time on the first or second day improvising around an omelette. I think we must have eaten 20 omelettes and cooked just as many.”
Various endings were considered for the sequence, including “one where I storm out, one where we threw crockery at each other and one that had us both in tears,” says West. The one used sees Charles calmly but harshly say his family will be better off without Diana and then walking out, before Diana bursts into tears. “What we ended up with was something which was not quite so emotional, and, I think, more poignant as a result.”
“I was young at the time, and probably set too much store by people’s appearances,” says Williams about what she made of the Royals during the years dramatised in season five. “So in a very shallow way, one was bemused as to why Charles would love Camilla when Diana was very photogenic and beautiful. Every time we have a photograph of Camilla from that era, she looks angry or upset or preoccupied. Now I think, ‘Of course she looked angry and miserable — she probably had photographers on her property illegally.’”
“I think they were going through hell,” says West. “Not being allowed to be with the person you love is a particular kind of torture, and I think they were feeling it acutely at the time. At that stage, it was certainly never a given that they’d ever be allowed to be together or get married. It was a deeply painful time for Charles, and of course Diana’s death made the whole thing even more tumultuous.”
That Charles and Camilla would eventually marry in 2005 shows how perceptions shifted in the years that followed. And when it came to this year’s coronation, West and Williams were as gripped as everyone else. “During the ’90s, Charles was constantly being asked, ‘Do you think you’ll ever be king?’” muses West. “So it must have been a relief for him for that to be finally accepted by everyone without much question.”
Williams, meanwhile, found herself ruminating on more hirsute matters. “As the crown descended on Camilla’s head, her hair got in the way,” she says. “It was an experience I had constantly with my wig, so I felt deeply empathetic. If a crown falls off or hair gets in your eyes on set, someone comes and fixes it. You can’t do that when the world is watching, so I was a stress-mess watching them go through it.”
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