‘Cool cat’ Duke deserves as much acclaim as Queen, says Crown actor
Star who plays him in TV drama says ‘roguish, brilliant man’ is worthy of greater celebration
THE Duke of Edinburgh is a “cool cat” who is as worthy of celebration as the Queen, according to Matt Smith, the actor who plays him.
Smith, 35, who plays the Duke in lavish Netflix royal drama The Crown, questioned why the recently retired 96-year-old was not the subject of such reverence.
“Rightly, as a society, we’ve celebrated Elizabeth as a wonderful example of a powerful, stylish, brilliant woman,” he told The Observer.
“But in many ways, what an example of a roguish, brilliant man. Why aren’t we as men allowed to celebrate that, fictionally or not? And I just found a lot to celebrate in Philip.”
While the first series of The Crown, the award-winning royal saga created by Peter Morgan, focused on the young Queen Elizabeth, played by Claire Foy, as she married and became Queen, the second turns its attention to the Duke in his younger heyday.
It begins with the Suez Crisis in 1956 and ends with the birth of Prince Edward in 1964. But the Queen, whom, it has been claimed, does watch the show with her son and daughter-in-law, the Earl and Countess of Wessex, may not find it easy viewing.
It opens with fissures in her marriage amid reports of the Duke cavorting around the globe with Australian equerry Mike Parker during a five-month solo tour.
But Smith is sympathetic. “If you strip away the royal familyness of it, it’s two human beings,” he said.
“I challenge anyone if their partner said, ‘By the way, you’re going off for five months,’ to not go, ‘Whoa, hang on!’ And I defy anyone to be married as long as they have and it be plain sailing the whole way. As human beings, they’ve struggled.”
The notion that the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh might snuggle down together to watch
The Crown is an intriguing one that many a fan of the lavish royal drama has pondered.
Unfortunately, the Duke appears to have quashed any such prospect as utter folly, in characteristically brutal terms.
Smith revealed that a friend of his, “a man of prominence in the film world,” was at a dinner hosted by the royal couple when he decided to bite the bullet and ask him outright.
“What do you do?” the Duke had asked. “Are you involved in this … Crown thing?”
No, came the reply. But as the meal ended, he plucked up the courage to ask: “Philip, I’m just wondering, because I have some friends who made The Crown, have you watched any?”
The Duke, so the story goes, stopped and glowered: “Don’t. Be. Ridiculous.”
The anecdote is one that greatly amused Smith. “Whether it’s true or not, I don’t know, but I just think he’s a bit of a cool cat. And that’s what I love about him: he’s done what he wants, when he wants, how he wants, with whom he wants. He hasn’t asked permission. And his wife’s the Queen.”
‘Whether it’s true or not I don’t know, I just think he’s a bit of a cool cat. And his wife’s the Queen’