Meet the newest ‘Crown’ stars
Josh O’Connor and Erin Doherty play Prince Charles and Princess Anne in the hit series
If you’re wondering how much Josh O’Connor and Erin Doherty knew about Prince Charles and Princess Anne before signing on to play them in The Crown, the answers, respectively, are “not much” and “virtually nothing.”
“I got off the phone with my agent and I was like, ‘I know The Crown, but who is this woman?’” said Doherty, joined by O’Connor for lunch in Manhattan. He’s not exactly a monarchist, either.
“If pressed, I would probably say I was a republican,” he says. “I’m just not that bothered, basically.”
Despite their ambivalence about the institution, Doherty and O’Connor have embraced their roles as the young royals, whose personal lives are a focal point of the third season of the Netflix drama. During a period of declining international influence and economic hardship for the UK, Princess Anne and especially Prince Charles face rocky transitions to adulthood and life in the public eye.
Charles begins to prepare for his future role as king, including a lonely stint studying the Welsh language. But the heir to the throne resents the way he has to suppress his feelings because of a job he won’t inherit for decades — especially when it comes to his love interest, Camilla Shand (Emerald Fennell). For viewers accustomed to seeing Charles cast as an aloof tabloid villain during his later marriage to Princess Diana, his vulnerability and likeability come as a surprise.
Nearly as unexpected is the way his feisty younger sister, Anne becomes this season’s scene-stealer, thanks to her disarming candour, lethal eye roll and
taste for David Bowie. Unburdened by being next in line, she’s free to tell it like it is, and she does so frequently. During a pivotal showdown, she tells her horrified mother, Queen Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman), that all she wanted from a hookup with Camilla’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Andrew Parker Bowles, was “a bit of fun.”
“There’s something that happens to you when you know your mum has something that will always be more important,” Doherty says. “Ultimately, it makes me feel so sorry for them. I wouldn’t want to be them.”
“I think it would be rubbish,” O’Connor adds.
Doherty and O’Connor will soon resume filming season four of The Crown. The actors followed similar trajectories to The Crown and share a sibling-like dynamic. Both former soccer players, at one point in the conversation they challenge each other to a “keepie-uppie” contest. Like Colman, they studied drama at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. And they both recently appeared, opposite Colman, in a PBS Masterpiece adaptation of
Les Miserables.
O’Connor, 29, grew up in Gloucester, in the west of England. Fans of British television may recognise him from his role as writer Lawrence Durrell, the oldest sibling in a family of British expatriates, in the PBS Masterpiece series The Durrells in Corfu.
Doherty, 27, who was raised in Crawley, just south of London, appeared in Call the Midwife as a young mother whose husband is blinded in an industrial accident.
So how do you feel about Charles and Anne, now that you’ve come to learn so much about them?
O’Connor: I have huge fondness for Charles as a person. I’m still none the wiser as to what he’s actually like, of course. Obviously, this is a fictionalised version of him.
Doherty: Since spending pretty much a year in these people’s shoes, I feel an immense amount of compassion just because I feel like the situation that they’re in is so relentless, to be under that kind of mass scrutiny 24/7. I don’t know how they do it. I would never want to trade. It’s so lonely.
As you were preparing for these roles, did you learn anything about these people that was illuminating for you as performers?
Doherty: I think for me the moment I unearthed all this bad press that Anne received when she was really quite young. They were calling her frumpy and things like that. I was like, “My God, if someone said that to me when I was 15, I would have a nervous breakdown.” And she went the other way. It makes me admire her even more.
Charles and Anne really do seem to share a bond.
O’Connor: One of my favourite moments in the whole series is when Anne says goodbye to Charles as he’s going off to Wales. She kisses him on the cheek, and there’s this weird moment of brotherly-sisterly love, and then she undercuts it with a punch to the stomach. It’s like, “I will show you warmth, but remember, we are just brother and sister.”
Doherty: They’re so great to play, because of that push and pull: “I want to do this, but I have to do this.”
I was a bit scandalised by their overlapping love lives.
O’Connor: It’s a bit weird, isn’t it? But they all are a bit like that in that world. Part of the problem they had with Camilla is she wasn’t close enough to the family. In aristocracy terms, Camilla was new money, essentially. Maybe a couple hundred years’ worth of money, as opposed to generations and generations.
Speaking of Camilla, Charles comes across as surprisingly vulnerable.
O’Connor: He’s so vulnerable. It’s interesting, isn’t it? I’m obsessed with the assessment of masculinity or, I suppose, modern-day masculinity. Many Western men grew up with a view of what masculinity should be. I think Charles had to be a leader of men, and so what that means and the history of what that means must have been so impactful. He must have felt like he had to live up to that. He’s been surrounded by Philip and Gordonstoun, this rough, tough [environment]. And Charles isn’t that. I’ve always seen him as vulnerable. That’s not to say weak, I just think vulnerable and really in need of a mother.
Did you spend a lot of time Googling things?
Doherty: I did. And then I had to stop because I would have just kept going. There came a point where I was like, “I’m too obsessed, I need to just get rid of it.” The pressure of it being a real person can just squash you.
O’Connor: You just spend so much time living and breathing these characters. Especially now, we’re doing all the Diana period, so there’s so much pain that you’re going through with them. I worry about him. Not him as a real person, but as a character. You feel really guilty, and you don’t want them to have a bad name.
Has getting to know this world given you any perspective on contemporary royals currently in the headlines, like the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, or Prince Andrew?
O’Connor: My investment is in these characters and beyond that it’s quite difficult to engage.
Doherty: But also I think we’re a specific time period within the context of these people’s lives. I found it really important to just eradicate everything else. In order to tell the story, I need to not know, because I want to know these people at this time in their lives. O’Connor: Before I did this job, I didn’t care. I didn’t read anything about the royals, and that’s not going to change.