The Crown season six part two is right around the corner, and fans are particularly excited as it introduces Kate Middleton to the show, and explores the beginning of the Prince and Princess of Wales’s relationship after meeting at university. Meg Bellamy was cast as Kate Middleton - but what did it take to turn her into the royal?
Speaking about his work as the casting director on the show, Robert explained: "On something like The Crown you’re sent a script, you work out what ages they are, what versions they are, and think of who would be a good person for it… you’re taking it all the way through the process, auditioning people, and doing their deals and contracts."
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But how long did it take to find Meg Bellamy and Ed McVey? "Ages," Robert explained. "We looked high and low. We spent six months looking for Kate and William. We started with those two and then did Harry afterwards. We weren’t under any pressure to cast anyone particularly famous, we wanted to discover somebody, it’s exciting to discover somebody and put new faces out there!
"And you’re looking at teenagers so they’re not going to have a load of acting experience… we looked at schools and social media, we didn’t go down the drama school route - and that’s how we found most of them!"
Meg also worked with the show’s movement coach, Polly Bennett, who opened up about her work. She explained: "As a movement coach, I work with actors predominantly. I also choreograph but that's normally with dancers. When I'm movement coaching, I'm working with actors to create the physical life, the physical world of their character."
Speaking about helping Meg prepare for the role of Kate at university, she explained: "It was a personal thing for me where I was like, this is a slightly odd experience! I’m a similar age to them so I was looking at my adolescence at history. I’ve worked on the rest of The Crown and it was something in the distance, so that was quite strange.
"It was a little more challenging because their behaviour was a little less scrutinised, we don’t have a lot of footage of Kate Middleton prior to her being married, so there’s a bit more imaginative work to imagine why she moves the way that she does. We all move in different ways based on our experiences and how we’ve grown up and what sports we’ve done. The idea that she was a sportswoman at university means that she has a bounce and can reach people, which is where her popularity comes from.
She added: "It’s about taking what we can see from all the physical evidence that we have of these people that already exist and turning it into practical thoughts for actors to use when they're on set, dealing with script changes and all that sort of stuff, and to have a vocabulary so that they have a character that they're not necessarily doing an impression, they're doing an authentic interpretation of somebody."