A Very Royal Holiday Season

Just when you think you’ve learned everything you possibly could about the newly crowned King Charles III, in come the fifth episode of The Crown and its closing scene: Dominic West, as Charles, break-dancing with a group of teenagers. Even on a series that’s sympathetic to Charles, it’s an astonishing thing to witness—and even more astonishing when you realize that it really happened. “It’s one of my proudest achievements,” says Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Princess Diana, of discovering the original video and showing it to series creator Peter Morgan. Adds West: “Charles takes his dancing quite seriously. He quite fancies himself as a dancer. So that was a nice character trait.”

On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, both West and Debicki catch up with Vanity Fair’s Julie Miller about their experience making the fifth season of The Crown, their current work on the sixth and final season, and the tiny discoveries like that break-dancing video. Some of those discoveries, it turns out, happened well after the events depicted on the show—such as King Charles struggling with a fountain pen early on in his reign. “It was amazing that after the queen had never shown any sort of emotion or any sort of anger in 70 years, Charles took over and within about five minutes he was, ‘Bloody pen—oh, God, get it away!’” West says. “That was gold, as a character thing. I think he’s obviously inherited his father’s temper, but he is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, and he’s immediately a different style.”

The Crown’s New Season Will Feature This Delightful Charles-Camilla Scene

Dominic West and Elizabeth Debicki speak to Little Gold Men about Charles’s epic break-dancing, depicting Charles and Diana in the ’90s, and filming The Crown’s final season.

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