Yahoo News The Crown star Josh O'Connor admits he'd never ridden a horse before season 3
The Crown star Josh O'Connor is opening up about the pretty important thing he had to do for season 3 of the Netflix series that he'd never done before.
In a new interview, the actor said that it wasn't until after he was hired to play horse-riding and polo enthusiast Prince Charles that anyone actually bothered to ask him if he could actually ride a horse!
Related: The Crown pics recreate Charles and Camilla story
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the actor said: "I got a phone call two weeks before we were going to start from someone saying, 'You know the first day’s polo'.
"I was like, 'Sure, that sounds great.' They were like, 'And you can ride a horse', and I was like, 'Absolutely not. Never been anywhere near a horse.' There’s this assumption that every British actor, they can ride horses. Definitely not!
"So, 'Okay, no problem, we’ll give you a lesson.' I had one lesson with Devil’s Horsemen, who do a lot of the horse-riding stuff for films. They train actors to look reasonable on horses. They do Game of Thrones, everything.
Related: The Crown review: Does the new cast work?
"And they were great. But I'd never been on a horse. So, at the end of the session I knew how to get on a horse, and sort of wobble on it, while it slowly walked a couple of steps, and that was it."
He continued: "Then they said, 'We’ll send [you to] the polo guy.' The polo guy was this Irish coach, who’s now a really great friend. We met up at the polo pitch and I said to him, 'Look, I’ve never been on a horse until yesterday,' and he was like, 'It’s no problem, Here’s your stick.'
"[He] put me on the horse and I was off. I was sort of flailing around. But by the time we shot the thing I was hitting balls with the stick! I was going to carry on but then I looked at how expensive it is.
"It is the most expensive sport in the world. I was like, uh, maybe I can’t. But that was really fun. And actually I watched that [footage] back yesterday. It looks pretty amazing."
The Crown returns on Sunday, November 17 on Netflix.
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