Josh O'Connor, Olivia Colman and 'The Crown' Showrunner Discuss Season 4
A few months ago, to celebrate the easing of lockdown, Esquire editor Alex Bilmes met up with British actor Josh O'Connor for a socially distanced dog walk to discuss his role as Prince Charles in the long-awaited fourth season of The Crown. (The resulting interview and shoot appear in full in the new issue of Esquire, which is on sale now – subscribe here). We managed to chat to Olivia Colman and the show's creator, Peter Morgan, too. As socialising in 2020 goes, it beats a two-hour Zoom meeting.
So what did they have to say? Well, the trio were understandably tight-lipped, but we managed to extract some interesting little details about the most anticipated British TV event of the year. We also caught a glimpse at some key scenes. Check out everything we learned below.
Prince Charles’s life will only become more conflicted
But you knew that already. It will cover a passage of time in which the would-be king is struggling to find meaning, and raging against the twin pressures of royal expectation and press attention. Not to mention his marriage, which is doomed from the start.
Most of the season four clips we watched feature Charles feeling sorry for himself. We see him on the phone to Camilla, complaining that Diana is “a child.” In another scene, set during Charles and Diana’s tour of Australia in 1983, he grows jealous of her easy, likeable, media-ready demeanour. “I don’t deserve this!” he whines. “This is supposed to be my tour.”
Peter Morgan, creator and writer of The Crown, compares Charles and Diana’s marriage to “three Brexits and three Covids wrapped into one”. He went on to say: "Everybody is defined in some shape or form in terms of their reaction to the events that [the royal family] inflicted upon us. And at the heart of all that was this marriage. I think what’s so sad about it is they were such a dream team. It could have been so fantastic.”
Josh O’Connor’s performance as Prince Charles is impeccable
Or so say his co-stars and colleagues, who admittedly have some skin in the game. You wouldn’t exactly expect them to lay into him, would you? Still, the plaudits are pretty darn glowing.
Peter Morgan, creator and writer of The Crown, calls him the Andres Iniesta of acting – understatedly impressive and cultured in other words – and goes on to call him an “inside out actor”; a “proper actor’s actor.”
“Particularly with a part like Prince Charles, it’s so easy to get it wrong, so easy to descend into caricature, into impressions,” says Morgan. “His first day as Prince Charles, we just immediately knew how good he was.”
Olivia Colman went on to praise the way that Connor disappeared into the role. But how did he do it? “You put yourself in someone else’s shoes,” she says. The qualities required, according to Colman, are “an emotional intelligence and a natural empathy. Josh has got that in buckets.”
Francis Lee, the writer-director who cast O’Connor in 2017’s God’s Own Country, also has praise for his performance.
“What he does,” Lee says, “is he allows access to the character of Prince Charles, an idea of who he is. Josh makes him feel a three-dimensional, resonant character, somebody you could have sympathy for and understand. He has made a symbolic figure a very human figure.”
The Crown creator had never heard of O’Connor before casting him
Despite his stand-out performances in critically acclaimed British films like God’s Own Country and Only You, Peter Morgan didn’t target O’Connor for a part in show.
“To be honest with you, I hadn’t heard of him. But all the football scouts knew about him, if you know what I mean [edit: you probably don’t know what he means. Check out the full profile for a football-based explanation]. They all knew he was going to be an international. I was being told by lots of wide-eyed people, when we got him: ‘This is really good news.’"
He went on to compare the experience to discovering Michael Sheen fifteen years earlier. “I remember when we first did The Deal” — Morgan’s 2003 TV movie about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown — “and the casting director said to me, ‘There’s only one person who can play Tony Blair’. I had no idea who Michael Sheen was. It was a similar sort of thing.”
Josh O’Connor has a Prince Charles scrapbook – and it smells glorious
In preparation for every role he plays, O’Connor fills books full of scribbles and scraps that bring him closer to the character. Prince Charles was no different. “I went on the website and ordered the most public school shorts I could find. Crispy white shorts. I got those,” he told us, “and I soaked them in mud and left them in a sports bag for a week and cut out the material and stuck that in.” Suitable, as Prince Charles spent four miserable years at the sport-heavy Gordonstoun independent school in Scotland in his youth.
He managed to cover up the smell of muddy shorts, though. “I get quite experimental,” O’Connor says. “It’s purely for me, no one ever sees [the scrapbooks]. I bought some aftershave, the oakiest one I could find, the most Charles-y one I could imagine, and sprayed that in the book. Maybe it’s kind of over the top and maybe it doesn’t help me at all but I do it for fun, so who cares?”
The idea, he says, is that “Senses trigger emotional responses and memories. With any character, you’re trying to create something that isn’t just a performance, something as vivid as possible.”
Series Four of The Crown will air on Netflix from 17 November
Josh O'Connor's exclusive interview and shoot appear in the September/October issue of Esquire, on-sale now.
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