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Josh O'Connor On 'The Crown' Season Four And The Pressures Of Playing A Prince

Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Esquire
Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Esquire

From Esquire

Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Esquire
Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Esquire

It is just about possible, I suppose, that beneath Josh O’Connor’s exceptionally genial exterior lurks a saturnine, tortured young man, a shadow O’Connor, not unlike the saturnine, tortured young men he has made his name playing on stage and screen — most famously his hangdog Prince Charles, in The Crown, the lavish royal family saga that has had bums superglued to sofas since its debut, on Netflix, in 2016.

Unlikely, perhaps, that O’Connor’s friendly façade conceals dark secrets, but not impossible. Because if we know one thing, and only one thing for certain about him, it is that O’Connor, at 30, is a supremely gifted actor.

“He is my favourite kind of actor, which is a transformative actor,” says Francis Lee, writer-director of God’s Own Country, the 2017 film that cemented O’Connor’s reputation as among the most exciting talents on British stage and screen. “He’s a shape-shifter.” Lee goes on to liken O’Connor — without, he insists, exaggeration — to Daniel Day-Lewis, perhaps the most admired actor alive. Then to an actor with whom Lee has recently been working: Kate Winslet, no slouch herself. “Kate Winslet’s not acting,” he says. “She’s being.”

“Exactly right!” says Olivia Colman, O’Connor’s Oscar-winning, Golden Globe-winning, everything-else-winning co-star in The Crown. (Rabid republicans, and those without an internet connection, will be interested to learn that Colman plays Her Majesty the Queen, having joined the cast, along with O’Connor, for series three, in 2018.) “Some actors, just as you said, are being it,” Colman says. How do they do it, I wonder? “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.”

Peter Morgan, creator and writer of The Crown, is fond of football analogies. Rather than Day-Lewis, he prefers to compare O’Connor to Andrés Iniesta, the former Barcelona midfielder, sometimes described as a “complete” footballer, for the subtle, unassuming, world-beating mastery of his craft. O’Connor, he says, is an “inside-out” actor, and 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.”

Precisely my point. If O’Connor is a complete actor — having convincingly played, or even been, a binge-drinking, sexually incontinent Yorkshire farmer, in God’s Own Country; an alienated, isolated heir to the throne, in The Crown; the insufferable clergyman Mr Elton in a sugary big-screen adaptation of Emma; the young Lawrence Durrell in ITV’s The Durrells, and plenty more besides — how can we be sure that his public pose, as a decent, middle-class chap from the West Country, isn’t yet another uncanny shape-shift? Could there not be, lurking inside this companionable Englishman, a sour, brooding, self-absorbed monster?

“Sorry, no,” says Peter Morgan, acknowledging that while this might not make for sparkling copy, it happens to be true. “He’s a really, really, really lovely human being.”

“Everyone adores him,” says Colman, his screen mother, “and I adore him, and also if he actually was my boy I’d be so proud!” (“Clearly, I’m not old enough,” she adds, mock-affronted at her own suggestion.)

“He’s one of my favourite people in the world,” says Francis Lee.

Hell’s bells.

Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Esquire
Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Esquire

The man who would be the man who would be King, and I, arrange to meet, on a fine June morning, at the southeastern tip of Hampstead Heath, north London’s undulant oasis, to indulge in the quintessential social activity of spring/summer 2020: we are going to walk a dog. On this occasion, my dog.

This is late lockdown London. The rules, like me and O’Connor, are in the first stages of relaxation, hence our appointment in the flesh rather than on video. Still, we are obliged to observe government guidelines on social distancing, unlike the dog, a Labrador who has never felt obliged to observe guidelines on anything, governmental or otherwise. To say that she and O’Connor hit it off would be to considerably undercook it. Like Edward and Wallis, Charles and Camilla, “Josh and Popcorn” has all the makings of a grand romance, with concomitant highs and lows.

At one point, he encourages her to go for a swim in one of the Heath’s many ponds. Emerging sodden and sludgy, pond-weed in her teeth, she wraps herself around her new beau as he sits on a patch of grass, using his mustard-coloured jumper as a towel. When he stands up, his back is thickly carpeted in black fur. “What a dog!” he texts me later, after I thank him for putting up with her. If he is pretending, he’s an even better actor than DD-L, and could run rings round Iniesta.

O’Connor is tall, rangy, with a thicket of dark hair and strong features. He looks, I think, more like a young Lucian Freud than a young Prince Charles, though O’Connor’s face is kindlier, with unusually expressive eyes. Not unlike a Labrador’s. “A gorgeous puppy,” Colman calls him.

Our walk is a gentle stroll rather than a strenuous yomp. Skirting Parliament Hill it takes us from the Lido (closed, obviously) up past the Men’s Bathing Pond, where, pre-lockdown, O’Connor regularly swam (also closed) and back around to where we started.

This is O’Connor’s new neighbourhood. A year or so ago, he moved into a place in Kentish Town with the woman he refers to as his partner, Margot Hauer-King, an executive at WPP, the marketing giant. (She is the daughter of the London restaurateur Jeremy King, of The Wolseley and other grand dining rooms favoured by the nabobs of the creative and media classes.)

Living in the leafy part of Kentish Town feels, he acknowledges, grown up. O’Connor only very recently waved his twenties goodbye, and he’s been surprised, he says, by the effect it’s had on him. “Ultimately, I want to live in the countryside,” he says. “It’s what I’m used to. I feel more comfortable there. Suddenly, turning 30, it’s like, ‘What am I waiting for?’” In one’s twenties, he says, big decisions can be put off until later. “Now I feel I’ve got to get on with it.”

Had the pandemic not happened, rather than wandering the Heath with another man’s dog, today O’Connor would have been in rehearsals to play Romeo to the equally sensational Jessie Buckley’s Juliet at the National Theatre. That production, directed by Simon Godwin — who, among other things, put on the magnificent Antony and Cleopatra, with Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo, at the same theatre in 2018 — was set to be one of the hot tickets of London’s autumn season.

Instead, O’Connor is taking part in weekly Zoom calls about the future not only of that particular project — postponed but not abandoned, he says — but of live theatre in toto. The situation, he acknowledges, is grim. And yet he finds something “weirdly thrilling” in the prospect of having to find new ways to bring theatre to audiences, maybe outside traditional auditoria.

Apart from the disruption to his work, he has found the experience of lockdown valuable, as many of us have, though it can seem insensitive to say so, as he acknowledges. “I hope that for many people it’s taught us that pausing can be really healthy and productive.” He pauses. “I’m trying to be positive!”

He has rekindled a love of gardening. As followers of his Instagram feed (@joshographee) will already know, he has been making and posting his art: elegant line drawings, very early 20th-century European. He watched and loved Succession, having not seen it before. His plan to complete 30 outdoor swims in his 30th year in aid of Mind, the mental health charity, was compromised by the pandemic, but he’s almost done. Why Mind, I wonder? Because mental health is a really important issue, he says. Like, duh.

He has also been working: prepping for a film, an adaptation of Graham Swift’s slim, elegant novel, Mothering Sunday, which will begin shooting when shooting is once again possible. It’s an upstairs-downstairs period drama, set in 1914, turning on an affair between a clever country house maidservant (Australian Odessa Young) and the scion of the neighbouring estate, to be played by O’Connor. It will also star Colin Firth and (her again) Olivia Colman. It has, in other words, about as classy a pedigree as a film can have. O’Connor is, he acknowledges, extremely lucky to find himself in such a position, while other actors, especially stage actors, wonder when and even if they will work again. “I’m very fortunate,” he says, not for the first or the last time.

Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Aflo
Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Aflo

O’Connor comes from what he describes as a happy, loving family. “Good sorts,” he says. He was born in 1990, in Southampton, where his father’s side of the family is from. He grew up in genteel Cheltenham, the middle of three brothers: Barney, now an artist; Josh, now an actor; Seb, now reading for a PhD in ecological economics. A fellow actor once told him that lots of people in their profession are middle children, making up for having been starved of attention as kids. “But I never really felt like that,” he says. “I felt very appreciated by both my parents.”

His mother, Emily, was a midwife — “a caring profession,” as Olivia Colman notes. His father, John, was an English teacher. Both are now retired. “It was sweet,” he says of his childhood. “I’m very fortunate with that.”

O’Connor was educated privately, at St Edward’s School, Cheltenham, about which he has only good things to say. He was not a brilliant student. “Class jester,” he says, more often found in the school’s art studio than at his books. At 14, he had already discovered acting — the Scarecrow in a Year Six production of The Wizard of Oz was his first succès d’estime — when a new drama teacher, Jerry Strachan (pronounced like “brawn”) arrived at St Edward’s.

Until then, O’Connor’s interest in drama had been secondary to a more urgent ambition — “I wanted to be a footballer” — but Mr Strachan’s class was revelatory. The previous drama teacher favoured glitzy musicals. “I’d no interest in that,” O’Connor says. Not for him the big numbers, the jazz hands, the no-biz-like-showbiz. “I wanted to pretend to be someone and make it as real as possible,” he says. “Weird for a kid, I guess.”

Mr Strachan validated the teenager’s earnest approach. “It was amazing,” O’Connor remembers. “He was talking about Brecht. I’d never heard of Brecht! Or Stanislavski. All these people who took acting seriously. It wasn’t just about movie stars. It could be political. It could be important and artistic.”

While his schoolmates were applying to universities, O’Connor auditioned for and won one of only 14 places at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (alumni: Daniel Day-Lewis and, yes, Olivia Colman), where again he found himself lobbying his teachers for more time spent on serious acting, less on dance and singing. “I was a pain in the arse,” he concedes. “Too big for my boots, probably.”

He graduated in 2011, aged 21, into the traditional British actor’s finishing school: long periods of unemployment, punctuated by single days on episodes of Lewis, and Doctor Who, and small jobs in small theatres. “It was a shock to the system,” he concedes. But, as ever, he finds the silver lining. “I think I’ve been extremely lucky to have had the slower build. Actors who go from drama school to overnight [success], I always think that must be so hard.”

By this stage he was living in London, working three jobs to pay the rent on a room in a house in insalubrious Tottenham, shared with nine friends from drama school. “Not even that big a house,” he says. It took three years for the tide to turn. “I’d just done a play at the Donmar, and it wasn’t mad money but by my standards it was kind of great, and I went straight into a tiny bit, like six lines, on Peaky Blinders, and from there I went from job to job for about three years.”

His big break was on ITV’s The Durrells, an amiable Sunday night adaptation of the family-favourite Gerald Durrell books, with Keeley Hawes as the intrepid single mum leading her eccentric brood around Corfu. O’Connor plays eldest sibling Larry. For the first time he was recognised in the street. He mimics a passer-by. “‘Wait! Don’t tell me... Oh... go on. What have you done? Yes! That’s it! The Greek show!’”

For all this success, until The Crown, O’Connor’s reputation for excellence was based almost entirely on Francis Lee’s starkly affecting God’s Own Country, an agricultural romance (it’s a genre, honest) with the unmistakable stench of reality — of muck and sweat and blood and spunk — released in 2017 to breathless acclaim. O’Connor won a number of awards for his portrayal of Johnny Saxby, a lonely, surly, monosyllabic Yorkshireman, glowering as that county’s winter skies, whose miserable, pinched existence is transformed by the arrival of a handsome Romanian labourer, with whom he begins a passionate affair.

Photo credit: Des Willie - Netflix
Photo credit: Des Willie - Netflix

Rather reductively compared to Brokeback Mountain (also, granted, an agricultural romance), it has none of that gorgeous film’s prim decorousness when it comes to the sex scenes. Still more memorable than those are the scenes of animal husbandry, in which O’Connor and his co-star, Alec Secăreanu, perform veterinary procedures that would make James Herriot blanch.

“Raw and intense,” is how O’Connor describes the film itself, as well as the experience of making it. “We played it for complete truth,” he says. “I worked on the farm where we shot for three or four weeks before we started shooting, and I was still working on it while we were making the film. It was hard. I had the time of my life.”

Lee’s first glimpse of O’Connor had been on video. For his audition, the actor recorded scenes on his phone, while on location in Greece filming The Durrells. So convincing was he as a troubled young man that Lee initially worried he would be difficult to work with. His accent was so accurate to the specific area of rural Yorkshire where Lee grew up that he wondered how he didn’t know O’Connor already. And then, when they first met in the flesh, “in walks this beautiful, funny, emotionally open, middle-class boy from Gloucestershire!”

Lee puts O’Connor’s success in the role down to “hard work plus process plus a God-given gift”. The actor lost two stone for the part, from an already lean frame, then fell ill and lost another stone, ending up in hospital, on a drip. Committed is one word for that, I suggest. “Unhealthy is another,” replies O’Connor.

It’s not often that one sees a big screen romance in which when the principals aren’t shagging, they’re dry-stone walling. Not often, either, that one sees a love story about the process of going through IVF. In Only You (2018), his other significant lead role in a movie, O’Connor makes up, with the luminous Spanish actor Laia Costa, half of another charismatic couple in another bracingly naturalistic British film. He’s a post-grad student, she’s a council worker, older than him. They meet-cute, fall into bed, and shack up together. So far, so rom-com. Then they decide to have a baby, and find they can’t. O’Connor’s performance is another intimate study in masculine vulnerability.

I wonder how such productions will be possible, in the near-future at least, if actors must remain physically distant from each other on stage and set? Even when they do get back to filming scenes of human interaction, swapping spit with close personal strangers — all part of a day’s work for attractive young performers — will surely be off the agenda?

“You definitely couldn’t do God’s Own Country now, or Only You,” he says. “Or The Crown.” Then he changes his mind. “Actually, you probably could do The Crown.” It’s about the royal family, after all, a group of people who have been distant, socially and otherwise, from the world and each other, for centuries.

“To be honest with you, I hadn’t heard of him,” says Peter Morgan of the process of casting O’Connor in The Crown. “But all the football scouts knew about him, if you know what I mean. 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.’

“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.”

It’s a measure of the epic nature of the enterprise — according to some reports, the most expensive television drama ever made — that the adult Charles, after his mother surely the most significant character in The Crown, doesn’t appear on screen until episode six of series three.

We meet him at what the Queen describes as “a very delicate stage in his development”. Tell us more, Ma’am. “He lakes eckting,” she enunciates, the distaste palpable. To demonstrate his like of acting, the part we witness the student Charles undertake is Richard II. “One of my favourite plays,” says O’Connor. “Of all Shakespeare’s kings he’s so petulant and he’s such a child.”

The lines we see the woe-is-me monarch speak: “For you have but mistook me all this while: / I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?”

I almost consider asking O’Connor if he’d like to play Richard II himself, before realising that, in a sense, he already has.

In his first proper scene as himself, so to speak, we watch the senior members of Charles’s family arranged before him like a firing squad. They’re packing him off to Wales to learn the language in time for his investiture. It’s 1969. Charles is 21, an awkward, clenched young man, who has not even begun to come to terms with his twisted fate. His mother he describes as “vile and cold”. His supposed allies are his Machiavellian Uncle Dickie Mountbatten (Charles Dance), his dying Uncle David, the Duke of Windsor (Derek Jacobi), and his sister, Anne (Erin Doherty), and even she’s not exactly cuddly: “Chin up,” she tells him. “Nobody likes a misery guts.”

And so it becomes clear that O’Connor’s Charles is another O’Connor exploration of a wounded, distrustful young man. This heir to the throne is unequivocally a Richard II, rather than a Bolingbroke. “A horse,” as his father notes, “of a very different colour” from his mother.

“Mummy,” Charles tells the Queen after the success of his investiture, “I have a voice.”

“Let me let you into a secret,” she replies. “No one wants to hear it.”

“Which, in a way, I suppose is true,” says Colman, when I quote her the line. “The cruellest thing! Brilliant to play. But slightly heart-breaking to look into Josh’s eyes and say those things.”

The relationship between Charles and his mother, Colman agrees, is a “strange one”. When in character, she says, “You kind of want to give him a slap. ‘Oh, come on! Pull yourself together!’ But in our version of events, no one listens to him. And it’s awful. When he tries to express himself, he gets shot down. Had people listened maybe it would have been a different outcome. Well, it would have been.”

That qualifier — “in our version of events” — is key. Both O’Connor and Colman are at pains always to clarify that when they speak of Charles, or the Queen, they speak of the characters they play, as written by Peter Morgan, rather than the living, breathing people.

“We’re using those real people as a basis,” Colman says. “We don’t know them. We’ve never met them. They’ve never told us what they think of the programme. It’s all conjecture.

“It must be awful,” she says, “to watch a programme about yourself and you’ve had no input. None of us would like that.”

O’Connor says he was never much interested in the royals, and that he continues not to be. “It’s quite useful,” he says, “because if anyone tries to trick you into saying anything about the real royal family, I can’t, because I don’t know anything. When we went over to the Golden Globes, people were asking us about Harry and Meghan and I had to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’. Because I really don’t.”

Would he be interested in meeting Charles? Yes, he says, but only because it might be funny, the two of them in the same room. “But really, I’m disinterested. I got a gig playing him, but not even really him.”

Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Esquire
Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Esquire

To Morgan, I confess some confusion. O’Connor says he’s not playing the real Prince Charles, but a character. Is that right? “I understand why he’s saying it,” says Morgan. “He’s saying it to protect himself. Funnily enough, I’ve also distanced myself from what we’re doing. I try and always say, ‘I’m not writing about the royal family! I’m using them as avatars to tell the story of the second half of the British 20th century!’ I think that’s probably what he needs to do and think in order to preserve his sanity, just as I need to say that in order to preserve mine. But I’m entirely with you: of course he’s playing Prince Charles! But it’s Josh’s unique Prince Charles. In that way it’s as unique as a portrait.”

As with many epic dramas, The Crown consists of intimate moments, miniature domestic melodramas, punctuated by the sweeping grandeur of the crowd scenes, all played out against the background of great shifts in culture and society. It’s for those reasons, among others, that The Crown is regularly described as Shakespearean. Whether it’s a tragedy, or a comedy, or a history, depends on your own reading. Perhaps a tragicomic history.

“Like all great television shows, in my opinion,” O’Connor says, “it’s about family, and the politics of family. And that’s what’s interesting. Yes, all the costumes and the big houses and the quality of the cinematography and the music and the score, all that is amazing. But ultimately, at its heart, it is Succession, it’s The Sopranos, it’s about family, the nastiness and competitiveness and the love and insecurity, and all the things that we love to see play out. That’s what makes it successful.”

All of which is well put. But also, in my opinion, what makes it successful is that it’s about the royal family, a source of constant fascination, prurient and otherwise (mostly prurient) for millions of us.

And so, towards the end of the third series, much needed light relief, for Charles and the rest of us, arrives at the polo, where HRH is cheered lustily from the sidelines by an admirer. Who’s the blonde in the Barbour? Why, it’s Camilla Shand, apparently newly single having fallen out with the dashing Captain Andrew Parker Bowles, who is now on manoeuvres with Princess Anne. Charles invites Camilla, played by Emerald Fennell, to dinner (soundtrack: Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, “Beggin’”) and explains his position. His life, he tells her, is “not so much an existence as a predicament.” Why so? “Until she dies I cannot be fully alive.”

“For me,” O’Connor says, “That’s the juicy stuff. The question of having to wait for your mum to die in order for your life to have meaning, and what that means for a young man. It’s just bizarre.” He shakes his head in wonder. “Charles doesn’t necessarily want power,” he says. “But until she dies, what the hell is he doing? What is his existence? He has no purpose.”

In the third series, Morgan sets up the idea that Charles has less in common with his immediate family than with the disgraced Duke of Windsor, exiled in France with his brittle wife. The Duke is stylish, effete, waspish, grand, conceited, a free thinker, and a black sheep. Like him, we are encouraged to see Charles as the sensitive, artistic Houyhnhnm surrounded by philistine Yahoos. Albeit horsey ones.

“I do think there are a couple of strains within the Windsor dynasty,” says Morgan. “There’s a strain of the dutiful and a strain of the individualistic. If you look back over the last 100 years or so, there’s one line which essentially goes Victoria, Queen Mary, George V, George VI, Elizabeth, Anne. And then there’s another line which goes Edward VII, Edward VIII, Margaret, Charles.” The dutiful, of course, can be as dangerous as the dazzling.

“Watch out for your family,” Wallis Simpson tells Charles.

“Oh, they mean well,” he says.

“No, they don’t.”

And sure enough we see senior royals — Mountbatten, the consummate courtier, and the evil Queen Mum (who knew?) — conspiring to break up Charles and Camilla. “I won’t stand for it!” he tells the Queen. But he does. And so Camilla becomes Mrs Parker Bowles.

Which means that series four, which will air in November, promises much for O’Connor’s character: the fraught courtship, the arranged marriage, the first fissures in that marriage. In short, the raunchy, reckless, rampaging Eighties, the decade when the public life of the royals, and the nation, went from sober-minded broadsheet to toe-sucking tabloid.

I’ve seen clips of three scenes from the fourth series, when Charles and Diana, played by a newcomer, Emma Corrin, take centre stage alongside Colman’s Queen and another icon of the age, Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson. Further to the libidinous misadventures of the younger royals, expect Morgan’s drama to take on the Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike and the last throes of the Cold War. (No word yet on whether he’s managed to slip in any acid house.)

In each clip I saw, Charles is feeling sorry for himself. Not that he doesn’t have good reason. “She’s a child,” he complains on the phone to Camilla. He’s speaking of Lady Diana Spencer, who he has been told he must marry, by his father, in the “hanging room”, where a once-proud stag, not coincidentally, is having the blood drained out of him.

In a scene recreating Charles and Diana’s tour of Australia, in 1983, he is comprehensively outshone by his incandescent young wife. “I don’t deserve this!” he whines, through perennially gritted teeth. “This is supposed to be my tour.” (Di, incidentally, from the very few minutes I’ve seen, looks a cracker: Corrin seems to have captured spookily that odd mix of shy and calculating, the blameless assassin with the razor-sharp simper.) “The Diana stuff,” says O’Connor, “has been thrilling to play.”

“Charles and Diana’s marriage,” Morgan marvels, “it was three Brexits and three Covids wrapped into one, wasn’t it? 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. But you’re a journalist, I don’t need to tell you how significant a story it is.”

His theory is that as long as he maintains the distance of one generation from the events he’s describing, what he is doing is constructing a responsible historical account, rather than indulging in, as he puts it, “scurrilous journalism”.

That said, in conversation at least, the writer is unable to maintain decorum entirely. Here’s just one arrow unleashed from the Morgan longbow: “Charles’s campaign to make Camilla queen is as passionate and as committed and as ruthless, in many ways, as was Henry VIII’s campaign to make Anne Boleyn his queen.”

“Bullseye!” I feel like saying. And if that doesn’t make you want to watch season four, and season five after it, perhaps nothing will.

Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Esquire
Photo credit: Simon Emmett - Esquire

For each character he plays, Josh O’Connor creates a scrapbook, filled with photos and clippings and even small objects, attached to the pages. To start his Prince Charles scrapbook, he remembered a clothes shop in Cheltenham where he would get kit for school.

“I went on the website and ordered the most public school shorts I could find. Crispy white shorts. I got those,” he says, “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.” (Charles, as viewers of earlier series of The Crown will know, was scarred by his years at Gordonstoun, the brutal Scottish school he so hated.)

“I get quite experimental,” O’Connor continues. “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?”

I tell him it makes perfect sense to me that he would want to create a sensory record of Charles’s past, even an invented past, to inform his performance.

“It’s how we experience life, isn’t it” he says. “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.”

Francis Lee, with whom O’Connor is plotting another film, tells me he’s watched O’Connor’s episodes of The Crown “30 or 40 times”.

“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.”

But that, says Lee, is O’Connor. “He’s only interested in doing good work and pushing himself. There’s no complacency.”

“The reason I think he’ll do incredibly well,” says Peter Morgan, “and we can all settle back and look forward to a great career, is because he’s got equilibrium, which is rare. And quite unlike most of his characters, you get the feeling that the sun is shining on him and the wind is in his sails. It’s lovely, really.”

And really, it is.

“I’m very fortunate,” O’Connor says, as he straps on his helmet for the bike ride home.

And really, he is.

Fashion assistant: Dan Choppen

Photographer’s assistants: Tom Frimley, Bradley Polkinghorne

Series Four of The Crown will air on Netflix from 17 November

Photo credit: Esquire
Photo credit: Esquire


This article is taken from the September/October issue of Esquire, on-sale now. For a hit of style, culture and advice from the experts, subscribe now.

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