Meg Bellamy as Kate Middleton (pictured in 2005). Ed McVey as Prince William (pictured in 2001).This article was originally published on August 28. We are recirculating it now timed to the premiere of The Crown’s final set of episodes on Netflix. Be sure to also read Sarene Leeds’s recaps, McHenry’s review of the first four episodes, and Devon Ivie’s report on the re-creation of Diana’s final days.
After leaving off in 1997, The Crown is moving into the current millennium in its sixth and final season and taking a close look at the next generation of Windsors. In doing so, the show has cast three new relatively unknown actors in the roles of Prince William (Ed McVey), Prince Harry (Luther Ford), and Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy), in their teens and early 20s. Will and Kate famously met at St. Andrews in 2001, and so we’ll see plenty of McVey and Bellamy as the two lovebirds courting in college. Here, the show’s casting director, Robert Sterne, explains how they found the right trio to bring an interior life to these heavily photographed and tabloided young royals.
1.
You don’t just want a lookalike.
The Crown, according to Sterne, takes an approach of finding actors with a strong resemblance to the personages they’re playing, but who are able to bring something beyond a straight-up facsimile. “I think there’s a pleasure, for the viewer and everybody, if the actor looks like them,” Sterne said. “But it’s about finding people who have a connection with the writing and the role. You want somebody who’s going to represent as many different colors of a real, complex life as possible.” The show frequently toggles between the family’s public and private — its portrait of Prince William started to expand last season, with scenes of him watching his mother’s BBC interview and helping his grandmother operate the TV — so the casting team is interested in actors who have the ability to do the same in their performances. He added, “The way that the royals appear when they’re doing speeches isn’t necessarily the way they’d appear sitting on the sofa at home. We have to go through these thought processes and provide a 360-vision of these characters.”
2.
Cast as wide a net as possible.
“The great thing about The Crown is that there’s never any pressure to find a famous person to do the part, so it’s an open field,” Sterne said, so they did “a good old wide search.” (Though Sterne would’ve considered established names if anyone fit with a role particularly well.) The team conducted an international open call, putting out word to drama groups in universities and high schools, on casting websites, and on social media — “everywhere we could think of where teenagers who were interested in acting might gather.” The key requirement for these Gen Zers: Be able to convincingly play a range of ages from 16 to 17 to the characters’ early 20s and look enough like early-2000s Will, Harry, and Kate, no previous acting experience required.
3.
Winnowing down the field
After that initial scouting, Sterne and his team worked through hundreds of submissions for each role. They had actors read a page or two of dialogue from the script — a fairly innocuous and undramatic one “so we’d see what happens when Peter Morgan’s words start coming out of their mouths.” The Crown leans toward actors who bring out the subtext in even the most functional dialogue, and Sterne was especially interested in the ways someone could “make their own decisions and bring their own levels of sophistication to the characters.” Then, aspiring princes and princesses had to share a bit about themselves on tape, discussing their hobbies and interests “to get a sense of what they’re like in their own voice.” As the team narrowed down their search, they met with prospects over Zoom and gave them more scenes to read to explore different aspects of the characters.
4.
A Prince William with “a kind of incredible humanity about him”
In this season, William is “stepping into his shoes as a man, emerging from the tragedy that had happened in his early teenage years,” Sterne pointed out, referring to Diana’s death. Ed McVey (24) who eventually landed the part, had graduated from Drama Centre London in 2021 and done a few plays (including a production of Camp Siegfried at the Old Vic) but hadn’t appeared in any screen work. “Ed, starting out in his professional acting life, was the person who made the most interesting connections with the text,” Sterne said. McVey seemed at a point in his professional career similar to this version of William, finding his own way in the world. At the time of this season, the prince was getting full-court coverage in the press as a dreamy young heartthrob — “prince charming” as a People magazine cover dubbed him when he turned 18 — an image the show clearly intends to complicate. “William, in our script, is not just a set of adjectives. It’s about bringing a lot of different textures and seeing his humanity in light and shade,” he added. “McVey has a kind of incredible humanity about him.”
5.
Catherine Middleton, straight from Legoland
Meg Bellamy (20), who booked the part of Kate, responded to The Crown’s social-media listing for the role. She had graduated from high school (where she was head girl) with the intention of applying to drama programs but had held off during the pandemic and was working at a Legoland in Windsor when The Crown’s team first read with her. “She was terrific, and we just knew we were onto something from the start,” Sterne said. “She’s very bright, very charismatic, and a very good actress.”
6.
Making the perfect match
McVey and Bellamy, separately, were high up on Sterne’s shortlists, but a crucial test came with trying out Will and Kate together. Once they brought their lists down to four or five names, The Crown brought in the actors to read across from each other and test the different dynamics. “We needed to find a relationship whereby the two characters felt like they had come home, in some sense,” Sterne said. “It was about what happened when these two characters met — that’s what we were keeping a keen eye for.”
7.
A Prince Harry who applied as a lark
Luther Ford (23) was studying filmmaking at university, not interested in becoming an actor, but a friend suggested that he apply for the role of Prince Harry. “Then we met with him and couldn’t believe how great he was,” Sterne said. “He’s got such energy. Once we put the three of them together, we thought, Here, we’ve got our trio.”
8.
A test with the queen herself
Sterne also had the young applicants read lines across from the actors playing the older characters, a kind of Balmoral Test of its own. He was interested in making sure there was a familial resemblance between generations of princes — as well as actorly chemistry. Sterne has had lots of experience searching for princes to fit the exact ranges needed in different seasons of The Crown — “We’ve had loads of them; it’s a bit like a jigsaw puzzle working it out” — and in season five, Dominic West’s own son, Senan, played the William to his Charles, which worked out well considering they needed someone who looked like a 13-year-old Etonian (which Senan was). For this go around, considering the depth needed to play the more expanded takes on William and Harry, Sterne got help from the queen herself. “Imelda Staunton said, ‘I’ll come in and have a go at these boys,” and Dominic also came in and did scenes,” Sterne said. “We really wanted to see what it was like to put this family together.”
9.
And no, there’s not a Meghan Markle.
“Lots of people wrote in saying, Could I be Meghan Markle?” Sterne said. “And I was like, ‘You can’t, I’m afraid, because she doesn’t appear in this one.’ It ends before she enters the story.”
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