What little we know of Prince William and then-Kate Middleton’s courtship is that Kate was desperate to throw herself into his path for much of her teens, and then she made sure to hang around William’s group of friends while they were at St. Andrews. The story was that William and Kate were generally in the same circle of friends, then things changed when a scantily-clad Kate walked a runway at a student fashion show. By their third year, they were living together with some other friends. Reportedly, they had some breakups even during those university years too, and William openly cheated on her. No one expects Netflix’s The Crown to tell that version of the story, but according to the actor playing William, their romance will not be some big fairytale.
The Crown will portray the Prince and Princess of Wales’s early relationship as “stagnated and weird”, the actor playing William has revealed. Ed McVey, 24, said he wanted to avoid depicting the beginning stages of the Royal couple’s romance on the hit Netflix show as “smooth sailing”.
He said: “We didn’t want to make it a smooth journey, meeting and falling in love and then getting together. We wanted it to be stagnated and weird, as relationships are, because there’s never smooth sailing, nothing is ever one thing.”
“We know that they get together in the end and we know that they’re perfect for each other, and we know how much they love each other … but we wanted to put as much in the way of that as possible,” he explained. “Put so many bollards and so many emotional brick walls, essentially, in terms of them getting together. And really what we wanted is for the audience to be like, how are they going to get together? We want the audience to be like, ‘oh just say the right thing or just stop being so awkward with each other and just get together’ and then luckily you see that in the end,” he added.
Meanwhile, Meg Bellamy said she faced challenges depicting a young Kate as there was “no footage” of her talking or walking in the university years era that she portrays her. The actress said that she tried to pitch her voice higher, for example, to “remove the royal protocol side of it”, adding: “I tried to make that more youthful, more like myself.”
“Put so many bollards and so many emotional brick walls” – they’ve turned it into a romantic comedy? Interesting. I mean, there’s part of me that’s happy that The Crown isn’t rewriting the narrative to make it sound like it was love at first sight. Kate really had to work hard to get his attention, she and her mother put so much time, energy, money and effort into baiting the honey trap, only for William to not take the bait for a while. Once Kate got him, she wasn’t letting him go, no matter how he treated her.
Photos courtesy of Netflix.
He and I have a different opinion on what love is because in my opinion this was a marriage for Peg because he couldn’t get anyone he really wanted to marry him so settled. She wanted a crown and did all in her power to bang her way towards that end. This is just my opinion.
It’s pretty hard to say love when we see them openly dislike each other and avoid contact as much as possible.
I’m very curious to see the reaction of people to the see through dress moment. Don’t think it’s well known at this point. Although I’m guessing it’s only people already interested in the royal family now.
Where did you get the idea that they dislike each other?
To me what’s interesting, and I know nothing about this time period, is how Kate was actually able to get in with that inner friend circle. I’m assuming there was effort but there must have been others trying to get in as well.
The real story is how did Kate get into the same living space as William at St Andrews. There is no way his roommates would be randomly assigned by the university.
In the UK you typically rent a house with friends after the 1st year (when most people go into a halls of residence).
They weren’t roommates during their first year but they did live in the same residence hall.
Getting assigned to that same residence hall would have meant everyone was screened, at least as much as it could be done in the early aughts.
That’s why her parents (or technically Uncle Gary) paid for her to go to fancy schools, it gave her access to the people who knew him.
I feel like from Marlborough on she selected her friends based on who knew William, or who knew William’s friends. For example – Kate’s friend Sophie Carter, who is one of the two routinely mentioned as her “best friends,” used to date Thomas van Straubenzee. Now maybe that was after Kate and William were together, I’m not sure.
then the other friend that gets mentioned for her is Emilia Jardine-Paterson. I always forget the specific connection here so I looked it up – her husband went to Eton with William, and this is from Tatler – “The friends have known each other since their Marlborough College days, with Emilia also in Prince William’s social circle since their youth. She has often been credited with introducing the couple to each other at St Andrew’s University.”
So it seems Kate sought out girls as friends who could help her introduce her to William. She was definitely playing the long game, hope she’s happy with how it turned out.
@Becks1 Emilia JP is the one who introduced Kate to William in high school, before St Andrew’s. She comes from an old Spanish noble family and was/is very well connected, eventually marrying one of William’s best friends. She and Kate played field hockey together at Marlborough.
Kate and William met several times before they became “friends.” But that’s not the official story by most accounts because William doesn’t recall meeting her before university.
SarahCS you’re right. He would have been, they would have been, in halls for the first year. As a Brit, uni halls were (possibly still are) divided into women’s and men’s corridors. They were at my unis, anyway. Then you’d break into mixed friendship groups and relationship groups in the 2nd and 3rd years living in rented housing off campus. A lot of boy and girl friends would hitch up and live with other friends in groups of between 4 to 6 people. These groups shifted around a bit – some relationships spilt, for example, and a new person had to be found to make up the rent. Someone on here posted, is it Nic919, that there’s no way he would have been on a hall corridor with people not known to security. This is true. They would have vetted everybody in his proximity. I have no doubt.
So they are trying to whole suspense trope? Yuck.
There was an enormous amount of paparazzi video of Kate back in the day; did the actress not do some googling, or has it been scrubbed? Plus there was that time she & Pippa were getting pestered on the sidewalk & she stopped, hand covering her eyes, saying something like, ‘this is my private life’. The paps were actually pretty obnoxious at the time. Still, there was some video. Plus Kate went to some sort of marketing event, back when she was pretending to work for PP, and somebody asked her what she thought or something & she said she heard some good ideas.
Gah! Now I realize, I sound like a stalker. Sigh. Like everyone else, I was suckered in with the ‘who is William dating’ stuff.
The actress said there are no vids of kkkHATE AS A STUDENT so she had difficult portraying that part of her life.
I don’t know if it can be found online anymore but many years ago some female student that shared a class with Kate provided commentary saying she was known to copy others during exams and she got annoyed with her because she was quite full of herself. So she wrote wrong answers and sort of made sure those were visible for copying. She wondered what Kate thought when she got her results back and hoped it would be a lesson to her. Could it be fake or made up? Yes absolutely. But it sounded so like I imagine her to be that it forever influenced my perception of her.
The comments about her copying notes were made in the comment section of a Jezebel article. However this was when Jezebel was part of gawker media, so it is likely not searchable anymore.
Also the copying explains how she is so incredibly dim despite attending uni.
I wonder if she even read the Katie Nicholls book. That is probably one of the only books that covers those years. And who knows how accurate that information would be.
Didn’t Robert Lacey’s book band of brothers give a more honest account of that time period iirc? The book version before KP had him add chapters that read like it came strait from their comms team.
There was another book that Katie nicholls basically piggybacked from someone else mentions Robert Lacey and it’s either him of Christopher Anderson but they detailed the level of conniving to snag Will
This kid looks like the lovechild of Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling.
I went to a screening Saturday of The Crown here in New York. They screened episode 7 which is where William meets Kate at university. I don’t want to post any spoilers but I can say that I found the way that it was portrayed very odd given what has been written in dozens of books about their relationship at university. The three actors were there and I loved hearing them talk about their research and how they felt about their characters.
Morgan is too much of a royalist to have them portrayed as anything other than a love match / friends to something more trope.
Even Katie Nicholls who is generally sympathetic covers some of the stalking but they don’t want that out there.
But it was “stagnated and weird”. Still, he thinks there was and is genuine love there, not creepy stalker vibes. Rather than portray a dysfunctional relationship as it was, he’s saying the filmmakers invented barriers to true love so that “true love” had something to overcome. Now that’s weird!
That lingerie pic is so common it’s like we’re meant to believe when he saw her on that runway he imagined his whole future with her, and not like the next 15 minutes.
“and we know that they’re perfect for each other, and we know how much they love each other”
do we though? do we?
After watching the last episodes of The Crown and knowing how close Di was to her two boys and each other, I now find it even sadder that they’re estranged. How did it all go so horribly wrong?
that’s the royalist narrative though. Harry made it clear in spare that he and William were never close. his mother died and William didn’t even come into the room to share his grief with Harry and to comfort his younger brother.
That spoke volumes..Bizzaro world
That really is one of the biggest takeaways from Spare. I will never get the picture of a 12 year old Harry alone in his bedroom for HOURS after he learned of Diana’s death. It’s so fucking sad. Where was Tiggy? Or anyone who might have been able to hug a child?
She used kinky sexy and fetishes to snag Wills.
I’m actually glad it’s becoming common knowledge that Carole basically sold out her own daughter. She threw Kate in William’s path without caring about whether or not he was a good partner. She encouraged her daughter to stay with him even though the relationship was DNR by most standards. It’s sad when you think about the horrible parenting. Rather than encouraging her daughter to develop an identity with her own goals and following her own dreams, she encouraged her to be some guy’s doormat.
Carole Middleton was determined to push both her daughters into the path of titled men. They cultivated friendships with titled people. This began at their school, Marlbough. According to several accounts Kate, and possibly also Pippa, were included in groups of girls who were invited by William to parties at ‘Club H’, the basement drinking club at Highgrove. I doubt if William invited girls individually it was more likely that one or two girls he knew were asked to bring a number of friends along.
Pippa went to Edinburgh University and was known for cultivating friendships with titled people.
They have been called the ‘wisteria sister’ for social climbing . CarolE is creepy. The father seems ok. Pippa seemed to search for a wealthy man. To me he is far from attractive but whatever. CarolE is in the history books the whole fam dam lot of thèm, even Gary !