

In one group photo from a red carpet in 2014, West appears just over Charles’s right shoulder, grinning from ear to ear.ĭominic West alongside Prince Charles at a Prince’s trust event in london in 2014. West believes sincerely in its mission of helping disadvantaged youth. When I ask West why he wanted the role, he says bluntly, “I didn’t,” saying he was “very apprehensive.” He has met the new monarch half a dozen or so times through his ongoing role as an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust, the charitable organization Charles started in 1976. West thinks so highly of Charles (now King Charles III) that it almost kept him from taking the part. There is often a palpable attachment to-one might even say an affection for-the person they are representing.
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The series has a knack for picking actors-Claire Foy as the young Queen Elizabeth II, for example, or Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret-who resemble their counterparts to varying degrees but, more importantly, embody them in spirit. His inner monologue spiraled from “I don’t know what I’m doing” to “They’ve horribly miscast me.”īut if four blockbuster seasons, featuring an entirely new troop of actors every other time, have shown anything, it’s that The Crown casting department does not miss.


West fretted over the disconnect his first time on set, thinking, “Oh my god, I’m nothing like this guy.” His screen test opposite Elizabeth Debicki, who has been widely celebrated as a near match for Diana, “felt awful,” West recalls.

He doesn’t meld into the world of the monarchy quite as easily as his lesser-known predecessors have. The 53-year-old West has big main character energy, thanks to his star turns as Jimmy McNulty in The Wire and Noah Solloway in The Affair. Getty Images/NetflixĪs The Crown enters the most recent-and best remembered-stretch in the royals’ history, the physical comparisons between the actors and the real-life players keeps getting tougher. In seasons five and six of The Crown, Dominic West (above right) will portray Prince Charles, the heir to the throne. For example: Is Dominic West too handsome to play Prince Charles? But fans of the hit Netflix series, which cranks up the drama on its chronicling of the House of Windsor, have more pressing questions. The considerable condemnation ahead of the fifth season of The Crown has come from a royal biographer (Sally Bedell Smith said the “level of abuse is now beyond the pale”), a former prime minister (a spokesman for Sir John Major called it “malicious fiction”), and an Oscar-winning actress (Dame Judi Dench wrote that the series is “cruelly unjust”). Her complimentary remark about the rearview resemblance, Manville concedes, “was probably not the right thing to say, because he said, ‘What about the front?’” “The way that rather low parting goes down the back, and then it splays out,” she says.
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The pair were filming their first scene together, recreating the famed Ghillies Ball in full Scottish dress, with West clad in a kilt-but what struck Manville most was his hair. Manville dons the troubled tiara of Princess Margaret in the new season, premiering November 9 on Netflix, while West plays Prince Charles. “My God, you really look like him,” Lesley Manville told Dominic West on the set of the fifth season of The Crown, “from the back.”
