What little we know of Prince William and then-Kate Middleton’s courtship is that Kate was desperate to throw herself into his path for much of her teens, and then she made sure to hang around William’s group of friends while they were at St. Andrews. The story was that William and Kate were generally in the same circle of friends, then things changed when a scantily-clad Kate walked a runway at a student fashion show. By their third year, they were living together with some other friends. Reportedly, they had some breakups even during those university years too, and William openly cheated on her. No one expects Netflix’s The Crown to tell that version of the story, but according to the actor playing William, their romance will not be some big fairytale.

The Crown will portray the Prince and Princess of Wales’s early relationship as “stagnated and weird”, the actor playing William has revealed. Ed McVey, 24, said he wanted to avoid depicting the beginning stages of the Royal couple’s romance on the hit Netflix show as “smooth sailing”.

He said: “We didn’t want to make it a smooth journey, meeting and falling in love and then getting together. We wanted it to be stagnated and weird, as relationships are, because there’s never smooth sailing, nothing is ever one thing.”

“We know that they get together in the end and we know that they’re perfect for each other, and we know how much they love each other … but we wanted to put as much in the way of that as possible,” he explained. “Put so many bollards and so many emotional brick walls, essentially, in terms of them getting together. And really what we wanted is for the audience to be like, how are they going to get together? We want the audience to be like, ‘oh just say the right thing or just stop being so awkward with each other and just get together’ and then luckily you see that in the end,” he added.

Meanwhile, Meg Bellamy said she faced challenges depicting a young Kate as there was “no footage” of her talking or walking in the university years era that she portrays her. The actress said that she tried to pitch her voice higher, for example, to “remove the royal protocol side of it”, adding: “I tried to make that more youthful, more like myself.”

[From The Telegraph]

“Put so many bollards and so many emotional brick walls” – they’ve turned it into a romantic comedy? Interesting. I mean, there’s part of me that’s happy that The Crown isn’t rewriting the narrative to make it sound like it was love at first sight. Kate really had to work hard to get his attention, she and her mother put so much time, energy, money and effort into baiting the honey trap, only for William to not take the bait for a while. Once Kate got him, she wasn’t letting him go, no matter how he treated her.

Photos courtesy of Netflix.