Grief Becomes Them
‘The Crown,’ ‘Reservation Dogs’ and more take a closer look at the mourning process
THERE ARE SOME THEMES that just work on TV. Grief is one of those.
“Reservation Dogs” and “The Bear,” the first of which wrapped up its third and final season this year and the latter aired its second, began with death. FX’S “Rez Dogs,” which opened with a group of teens mourning their friend Daniel after losing him to suicide, ended with another loss — and another group of pals leaning on one another.
“The Bear,” meanwhile, launched with Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy attempting to move on after his brother’s death. In the second season, he is still coping with the loss as he manages a hectic kitchen.
Loss and mourning always look different, but the emotional theme runs through nearly every category this TV awards season — from dramas such as “Succession” and “Fellow Travelers” to miniseries “Lessons in Chemistry” and comedy “Shrinking.”
One of the biggest examples may be “The Crown,” as Netflix wraps up the drama with the sixth and final season featuring the longdreaded death of Princess Diana (portrayed by Elizabeth Debicki). The accident in which Diana was killed was, out of respect for the family, not shown on screen, but creator Peter Morgan and Co. did not shy away from the horrifying aftermath for the royal family.
Dominic West provided much of the heavy emotional lifting as then-prince Charles — letting out a horrifying howl when looking at her body in the hospital and telling his sons about their mother’s accident.
“When I read that Peter had written how Charles reacts to the news of Diana — when he sees her dead, he howls with grief in the Paris hospital to the point that they could hear him outside the room — I thought, ‘Oh, God, no. Oh dear.’ We don’t know, obviously, how Prince Charles reacted,” says West. “But anyway, he obviously decided to make him very emotional, and I’m glad he did, in hindsight and having done it. I think Charles is an emotional man compared to some of his family.”
West filmed the hospital scene multiple times. While Debicki was there for him to look at for some takes, the take that ended up being
used was one where West was just looking at a matte box camera, and she wasn’t actually there. And it wasn’t easy.
“How does a button-upped royal sound when they’re howling emotionally?” West recalls asking himself. “How do you do that without looking silly or unroyal? It was pretty traumatic.”
The whole season was extremely heavy, but Charles was mostly depicted in a positive light — especially when it came to him as a father. This was a shift from the previous season.
“In Season 5, Peter didn’t really think of him like he thinks of him in Season 6. We had a few discussions, particularly about him as a father and how warm or close he was to his sons,” says West, who spoke with numerous people who know Charles about how passionate he was over the years, so he brought that into his acting. “I thought that was a more honest portrayal of him. Peter saw him as much more distanced from his sons. We had a very interesting discussion with someone who had witnessed him with his sons, and she did slightly put him right. She said, ‘What I saw was a closeness.’ And then of course, Harry’s book comes out and we didn’t know what to think!”
In his book, “Spare,” Prince Harry writes that when Charles told Harry about his mother’s death, he placed his hand on his son’s knee and said, “It’s going to be OK,” which Harry says, “was quite a lot for him.”
For West, reading the book helped craft that scene in particular.
“I’ve been reading every newspaper article or journalistic article on him since I got the job. In a way, this was a gift that he was in the headlines every day when he was becoming king — like getting irritated by the fountain pen,” he says. “In the cold, formal exterior of this guy, I tried to get those little tells.”
He calls “Spare” a gift. “I know Peter didn’t read Harry’s book,” he continues. “I certainly did. I bought it immediately, and I think it did slightly affect the way we played that key scene where he wakes Harry up. I don’t think it really affected anything that Peter had written.”
Charles’ body language is also different following Diana’s death — and West watched hours of footage to get it down.
“He really does look like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. He’s utterly devastated, because I suppose it’s that particularly potent cocktail of not just shock and grief, but also deep feelings of guilt, which of course are enhanced by his sons’ attitude towards him,” he says. “It was quite a complex, heavy emotion in that.”
West also worked with a movement coach to get down Charles’ exact motions at different parts of his life.
“I always felt with Charles, he’s always looking up,” the actor says, referencing the Jonathan Dimbleby interview that was re-created in Season 5. “He looks up, almost with a kind of dread, like the Sword of Damocles is above him. I imagined that he was looking at this crown hanging over him, this dreadful burden that’s hanging over him. And there is a certain sense of that.”
While filming the show’s final episode, a real death happened: Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022 after reigning for 70 years. The mourning then turned real — and Morgan found himself rewriting scenes. Despite the show’s timeline ending around 2005, he didn’t want it to go unaddressed.
“We’d all been through the experience of the funeral,” Morgan recently told Variety. “So because of how deeply everybody will have felt that, I had to try and find a way in which the final episode dealt with the character’s death, even though she hadn’t died yet.”
West adds, “It is very much affected by the Queen’s funeral — she talks about it in the show, how her funeral will go. I realized it when I read the episode. Part of the reason Peter wanted to split this season into two is the incredibly dominating story of Diana is, sort of, put to bed, and we realize that what this whole show has been about is Elizabeth. Peter goes very much back to her, full circle, in the end.”