Immediately afterwards, Kirby starred opposite Tom Cruise and was nominated for an Oscar, while Corrin won a Golden Globe and became a generational fashion plate. Vanessa Kirby and Emma Corrin, meanwhile, were virtual unknowns when they were introduced as the first, chaotic Princess Margaret and a wide-eyed Diana Spencer, respectively. Claire Foy, who played the young Queen Elizabeth II in the first two series, and Josh O’Connor, who played Prince Charles at a similar age in the third and fourth, were already known before they were cast, but they became two of the most in-demand stars of their generation after their stints as Windsors. Since it arrived on our screens seven years ago, The Crown has given us many things: the most ravishing of history lessons memorable performances from many of our greatest screen actors and a sheer (but ultimately self-sabotaging) masterclass in how to troll the British media.īut perhaps its greatest gift has been the careers it has launched. ‘It’s not like at drama school, where your friend’s playing your grandma – it’s Imelda Staunton, who is a bit of a queen to me’ Then I got excited, and then…’ And then? ‘And then I felt terrified.’ ‘It was relief I felt, more than anything. ‘Then there were two weeks of silence, when I thought something had gone wrong.’ And then, after six months, he received the call that has, he estimates, probably changed his life. Next was a batch of ‘chemistry reads’, when he acted opposite a dozen Kate Middletons and a dozen Prince Harrys. ‘I didn’t butcher it, but I didn’t blow it out of the park, either.’ Then came another, where he found himself in a room full of people who looked eerily like him, or at least eerily like Prince William. A month later he was called to an in-person meeting. The first audition, in January last year, was a self-tape he ‘just sent off thinking it’s never going to happen’. It was only later on that people went, “Oh yeah, you do look like him…”’ Yet despite all this, he’s never once been compared with our future king. McVey is handsome, athletic and sandy-haired, with a public-school accent and an affable, relentlessly positive manner (‘Oh cool, I love a Brewdog pub!’ he says as we walk in, uttering words possibly nobody on Earth has ever said before) that means he’s probably terrific in conversation with pensioners. McVey worked with vocal and movement coaches to become William Peter Morgan’s epic Netflix anthology about the British Royal family was looking to cast a young-adult William for the second half of its sixth and final series. His agent soon told him about an open audition for The Crown. At the time of his job at the Playhouse he was 21, had just left drama school, and was looking for some acting experience – whatever that looked like. His name is Ed McVey, and he still can’t entirely believe how things have turned out. After all, this usher became Prince William. Instead, let this already strained anecdote serve as inspiration for theatre ushers and wannabe actors everywhere: today you might feel a pauper, but tomorrow you could be the prince. It feels weird to come full circle now.’Ĭommitted as we are at The Telegraph to uncovering the real people beneath the stories that matter, I am not in a pub in east London purely to track down the bloke who briefly sent Dominic West to the dress circle rather than the stalls that one time in 2021. ‘So I suppose that was the first time Dom and I met. ‘I had to run after him and go, “Sorry! Sorry!”’ He winces, then laughs. ‘And I sent him in completely the wrong direction,’ that usher tells me today, shaking his head. He was probably excited, having in his hand a ticket to the hottest show in town: Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley leading Rebecca Frecknall’s revival of Cabaret at the Playhouse.Īs curtain up approached, West – a Bafta-winner and our foremost actor in ‘The’ series, including The Wire and The Affair, but these days best known as a middle-aged Prince Charles in The Crown – asked a fairly useless and slightly awestruck front-of-house usher to direct him to his seat. A couple of years ago, the actor Dominic West ventured down to the Embankment in London for an evening at the theatre.
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