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His royal heart-throb
How The Crown has turned Josh O’connor into a royalist.
Cutlery,’ Josh O’connor says, having thought about it for a moment. ‘I think cutlery was the worst.’ I’ve asked him what, over the many months, days and hours of research and preparation he undertook before playing the Prince of Wales in Netflix’s upcoming third series of
The Crown, he found most taxing.
He could have said capturing the Prince’s unique drawl or familiar mannerisms. He could have said learning to ride a horse, or playing polo to a convincing standard. He could have said mastering an investiture speech in Welsh, for heaven’s sake. But no: knives and forks. I slide a teaspoon in his direction. Show me why it’s so hard.
‘OK, well, if this was a fork, the base is where it curves into the prongs, and if you’re aristocracy your index finger must sit just above it. Not on it, never on it. Just above. And then throughout the meal you can’t move your torso from bolt upright, so the food comes up to your mouth, not shovelling it in the other way around, which is my usual way,’ he says. A sigh. ‘That’s just the fork. Don’t get me started on soup…’
I have met the new Prince of Wales for coffee at The Goring. It’s the closest luxury hotel to Buckingham Palace, and also the only one awarded a royal warrant for hospitality services. The Queen loves it. Her mother, a sybarite to the last, regularly tucked into eggs drumkilbo – a lobster and egg-based dish that must be nicer than it sounds – in the dining room. The Duchess of Cambridge spent her last night as Kate Middleton here. And it was pastry chefs from The Goring who prepared a tiny Prince Charles’s christening cake.
‘Huh,’ O’connor says, eyeballing a complimentary sponge we’ve had delivered. ‘I should probably know that.’
Dressed in a khaki shirt, turned-up jeans and boots, O’connor, 29, is back for the weekend from Scotland, where he’s currently filming the fourth series of The
Crown. He’s just introduced Diana Spencer (played by Emma Corrin in her first major role) to the Firm at Balmoral.
O’connor’s wavy, almost black hair – combed and side-parted for Charles – is artfully upended on its day off. He has a slight Gloucestershire accent, and a bashful charm when talking about himself, but becomes lively to the point of kinetic when discussing any of the characters he’s played.
You may or may not have seen O’connor in his outstanding breakout film, 2017’s God’s
Own Country – an independent drama about a Yorkshire sheep farmer who falls for a Romanian migrant worker. Or in the role he’s most recognised for, as Lawrence in ITV’S
The Durrells. Or as Marius in the BBC’S recent adaptation of Les Misérables. But give it a few months and you’ll do well to avoid him.
The third series of The Crown arrives on our screens next month. It covers the period between 1964 and 1977 – roughly from Harold Wilson’s election to the Silver Jubilee – and sees a new cast take the reins. Surrendering are Claire Foy, Matt Smith, Vanessa Kirby et al; incoming are Olivia Colman as a far sterner Queen Elizabeth II, Tobias Menzies as an identity-questioning Duke of Edinburgh, and Helena Bonham Carter as a somehow even more chaotically bored Princess Margaret.
O’connor joins the fun as a 21-year-old Charles. Between mouthfuls of cake (eaten without cutlery, of course), he tells me he was offered the part while filming Les Mis, which also starred Colman. The deal was the same as any member of the cast: two series taking their characters through roughly two decades. For Charles, that means starting at university and finishing in the mid-1980s, after his wedding to Diana. Then an older actor, yet to be anointed, will take the baton for a final run towards the end of the century.
He was ‘really, really excited’ by the call, but he hadn’t coveted the part, ‘which is weird, since I was a fan of the first two series’. Kirby is a friend. ‘She said, “It’s fun, you’ll become obsessed with them, you’ll love it.”’ He gestures to the sides of his head, ‘I have the ears, obviously. But I didn’t really know about Charles. I always had in mind a Spitting Image version of him as a bumbling caricature, a bit of a national joke, so in that sense I wasn’t interested.’
O’connor leads a relatively quiet life, with a circle of close friends who aren’t famous, and he lives in north-east London with his long-term girlfriend, who not only isn’t an actor – she’s in advertising – but is so uninterested in the monarchy that she ‘had to ask if Princess Margaret is still alive’.
For a couple of days he had ‘an existential crisis’ about taking a role that would be certain to catapult him to international fame, but he got over that once Peter Morgan, the show’s writer, sent him a script. ‘There was a line when Charles says to Camilla about being Prince of Wales, “It’s not so much an existence as a predicament… in order for my life to take any meaning, my mother has to die.” That was a revelation for me. This young guy, and he’s in no man’s land. It was a huge concept.’
So, after saying yes, did he rush up to Queen Colman – who had already been announced – on the set of Les Mis, introducing himself as her new son?
‘Not quite… but we did speak about it. I think the whole playing-my-mother thing was actually bit weird for her. She’s definitely not old enough to play my mum.’ He panics for a moment. ‘Not that my mum is old, at all… Oh, God.’
Each episode in series three is treated as a mini-film, and poor old Charles has to wait until the sixth for his big introduction. Co-written by arch political satirist James Graham (This House, Brexit:
The Uncivil War), it shows the Prince’s term at the University of Aberystwyth, followed by his investiture as Prince of Wales, but begins with a scene depicting him doing what he’s still doing, 50 years on: practising to be a king.
Specifically, he’s in a dressing room rehearsing a student production of Richard
II, and muttering those immortal lines – ‘For within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king’ – in the mirror. Charles really did perform Shakespeare, though unfortunately never that text.
‘Richard II is my dream part,’ O’connor says. ‘I remember seeing the script and thinking, “Oh, the first time I’ll get to do it is as Charles…” Then I realised how similar they are. I found it strangely emotional.’
I’m keen to hear outrageous tales of on-set debauchery, but most of O’connor’s scenes involved Charles totally isolated from the rest of the Windsors, who were filming for months without him. In fact, the first time he saw Colman again, and met Bonham Carter and Menzies (one of O’connor’s heroes), was while filming the investiture at Caernarfon Castle. He had to
‘I’m republican in nature, but I’ve become a royalist. It’s been a strange journey’
stand before them, and hundreds of extras, delivering a speech in character, in Welsh.
‘There’s a bond – I know from The Durrells
– where you become like a real family. So I missed out on that, but it turned out to be useful because the whole thing about Charles at that time is he was separate, at university or with the Navy or wherever, and alone.’
Colman, with whom he later shares several pivotal scenes, is ‘just rock’n’roll, she turns it on like that’, before dropping the Her Majesty act again and telling dirty jokes. ‘I’d talk to her not about acting, but about life, and the idea of public and private. She goes into lockdown between projects because otherwise it becomes hard to maintain your own sanity,’ he says. ‘So I found her advice helpful, but it would never last long before a joke undercut it. We were a silly bunch.’
The company assembled for series three were blessed (or cursed) with access to acres more archive material, letters, press cuttings and living people who know their characters than the first cast. Research is O’connor’s favourite part of the job. Over four months, he consumed all he could about the Prince as a young man, immersing himself in fine tailoring, polo, homeopathy, the lot. He makes sensory scrapbooks for any character he plays, containing the smells and materials associated with that person. Charles’s aromas were ‘stale sports kit’ and an incense used in Latin mass. The latter was to signify religion, public school and wealth.
Through it all, he was struck by how ahead of his time the Prince was. ‘There are articles where he’s banging on about the environment in the 1970s. We rightly praise David Attenborough now, but Charles was there before it was fashionable,’ he says. ‘I think Charles is an incredible man, I’m mildly in love with him.’
It is, O’connor insists, not to be seen as an impression. But there are a few Charlesian ticks we might recognise.
‘I’ll show you an easy one I learnt,’ he says, straightening his arms out in preparation. ‘Whenever Charles gets out of a car, someone opens the door, he steps out, and then he goes…’ Head bowed, O’connor touches his right hand to his left sleeve, then his left to his right, then his right hand to his breast pocket, before unfurling into a cheery wave. It’s startlingly accurate. As if by magic, he has become Charles. ‘Cufflink, cufflink, handkerchief, wave. Every time.’
The middle of three brothers, O’connor was born in Hampshire, but the family moved to Cheltenham when he was a child. His parents – his mother is a midwife, his father a retired English teacher – are ‘very lefty’ and not royalists, though his ceramicist grandmother and ‘absolute best friend in the world’ certainly is. And what about him?
‘I guess I’m republican in nature, but I’d say I’ve gone full circle and become a royalist, which is the first time I’ve said that. It’s been a strange journey. I’m now genuinely interested and care. I have so much respect for the Queen and for Charles, and what the family represents,’ he says. ‘And yet there’s still a conflict about whether we can abolish the class system while also having a Royal family.’
He’s about my age, so I take a stab at his earliest memory of the royals: at seven years old, watching cartoons early on a Saturday morning in the summer holidays of 1997. Suddenly all channels switched
‘Olivia Colman is just rock’n’roll. She turns it on like that’
to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
‘Yes! It felt so serious, didn’t it? I ran upstairs, woke up my mum and shouted, “Wake up! The Queen is dead!” Then I did the same to Dad and Seb [his youngest brother, now an ecological economist]. Mum went downstairs and corrected me pretty quickly.’
Diana Spencer isn’t in The Crown until series four, but the third sees Charles start an early relationship with the future Duchess of Cornwall, Camilla Shand, before she elects to marry Andrew Parker-bowles. He, incidentally, is fresh from a fling with Princess Anne. Honestly, it’s like Love Island with more horses.
The following series will then show a little of Charles becoming what O’connor calls ‘a right playboy’, before focusing on his hasty courtship and engagement to Diana. ‘The relationship between her and Charles is really the dominant, cataclysmic thing in the family in that era,’ he says, ‘so I’m in every episode of the fourth series.’ Corrin, he adds, is ‘so, so good’ as Diana. She’s become a good friend, as have Emerald Fennell (the actor who plays Camilla, but whose other recent job, casually, was to write series two of Killing Eve )and Call the Midwife’s Erin Doherty, as a sassy Anne. ‘Her voice in it is amazing. In real life she’s a proper Cockney geezer.’
Cheeky and sporty as a child, O’connor struggled academically. His first onstage role was as the Scarecrow in a primary-school production of The Wizard of
Oz, which he recalls as foreshadowing his latterly diagnosed dyslexia.
‘My teacher wrote new lyrics, and one of my songs went, “I can’t make that link, I ain’t got an answer, I haven’t got a brain because I just can’t think…” It’s kind of haunted me ever since, them predicting my malfunctioning brain.’
Dyslexia still causes him trouble today, especially in learning lines. Shakespeare is rhythmic and easy, he says, but he’s just finished playing Mr Elton in a quirky, ‘Wes Anderson-style’ new film adaptation of
Emma from first-time director Autumn de Wilde, alongside Bill Nighy, Miranda Hart, and Anya Taylor-joy in the title role. It sounds fun, but learning the lines was ‘a nightmare’, he says. ‘Austen’s sentences are all back to front.’
By the time he reached secondary school, at St Edward’s, Cheltenham, an early love of football had been overtaken by drama as the most important thing in his life. His co-stars had improved, too. At the time the coolest boy in the school was Barney, O’connor’s elder brother (now an artist), but the coolest girl was Tahliah Barnett, better known now as avant-garde pop star FKA Twigs. She was two years above O’connor, and starred as Tallulah to his Knuckles in Bugsy Malone.
‘I’m pretty sure I have a memory of asking her out once, and her saying no,’ he says, looking to the window. ‘Though I used to get picked on. The other kids might have made that up.’ What did they tease you about? ‘My ears…’
O’connor’s acting ambitions couldn’t be slowed by name-calling. He enrolled at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, then moved to London to begin a haphazard juggle of income and auditions. At one point he had six part-time jobs, including two at call centres, but got on to the well-trodden path of television and film bit-parts (Lewis and
Doctor Who, then Peaky Blinders, and the satirical, star-making The Riot Club), before making it on his own terms.
He’s still under 30, but in recent years a clear thread can be traced between many of his major roles, and he knows it. ‘Masculinity, sensitivity…’ he says, before I’ve finished the question. ‘We’re living at a time when people are questioning what it means to be male in modern society, and I’m finding it very helpful to explore it through these roles.
‘The historical kings of England are all strong soldiers and leaders, but can you be a sensitive leader? It’s the same in politics, we talk about how proud we are to have had two women prime ministers, but would we be less ready for a sensitive prime minister?’
It’s a subject he’s interested in. People at school used to describe O’connor as ‘sensitive’ – and not as a compliment. His Instagram page is predominated by delicate pen sketches he does in his spare time. There’s also a link to sponsor his quest to do 30 wild swims in his 30th year, in aid of the mentalhealth charity Mind. His favourite thing is to cook at home, in his tastefully decorated one-bed Victorian conversion. Last night was just a bolognese, as he was back late, but he’s obsessed with the cookbook Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour. ‘Doesn’t everything need sumac in it these days?’ he says, searchingly.
‘There is a pressure for men in their mid20s. I remember a real sense of, “You’ve got to be The Man.” But I’m just not good at playing that role.’
I wonder if he’s interested in playing macho types at all. ‘I’d love to try. My friends and I used to joke about me playing James Bond. How he’d probably cry and get therapy after each kill. It shouldn’t necessarily be me, but actually I’d really love to see a sensitive man play Bond,’ he says. ‘At the moment I can’t really imagine myself being the rugged Tom Hardy type, but maybe that’s because I’m Prince Charles…’
It’s a good point, I say. People might see you in Die Hard 13 and think, ‘Is that the Prince of Wales kicking a Russian gangster’s head in?’ Panic creeps over his face again.
‘Oh, God. I’d hate it if people thought that. I don’t think it’ll happen, do you? It’s only two series, and I don’t look much like him…’
That’s not strictly true, but as it is, nobody in The Goring has taken a second glance at O’connor this morning. If we were here this time next year, I tell him, I expect we’d have a small gathering of fans hoping for a glimpse of their new Charles.
O’connor is braced. He recently received a large, ornate scented candle in the post, sent from ‘The people of Caernarfon’, where he filmed the investiture. The accompanying note read: ‘To lovely Josh – you’re our true Prince of Wales.’ He winces a little, but smiles broadly. ‘Bit worrying, isn’t it? I might just have to overthrow him.’ The Crown returns to Netflix on 16 November
‘It shouldn’t necessarily be me, but I’d really love to see a sensitive man play Bond’