Here are some photos of Meg Bellamy at The Crown’s Finale event in London on December 5th. Meg plays Kate Middleton in The Crown’s Season 6. No matter what the reaction to Season 6 and the final episodes of the show, I genuinely hope Meg gets a lot of attention – she’s so young (she’s only 21) and she’s very fresh-faced and pretty. I hope this is just the first big role in a long career for her. She’s already getting a lot of fashion attention, and Valentino made this custom dress for her. It’s a great dress too, and British Vogue dutifully wrote up a behind-the-scenes piece about Meg and her style.

In her promotion for The Crown, Meg has said nice things about Kate, likely because she’s been well-prepared by The Crown’s media team and because, again, Meg is very young. She wasn’t around to see how this stuff really went down in real time. She was just a little kid during the Waity Years.

The actress who portrays a young Kate Middleton in the final series of The Crown has said she hopes the Princess of Wales will look upon her depiction ‘fondly’. Meg Bellamy, 21, was chosen from thousands of applicants to play the future Queen of England in the Netflix show, which has followed the story of the royals since 1947. She was working as a red brick mascot at Legoland in Windsor when she got the call that she had secured the role, and immediately felt a ‘huge sense of responsibility’.

Bellamy told The Sunday Times: ‘I hope that I’ve done her justice. I don’t know what Kate would think of me playing her. I don’t know if she would watch it, but I would love her to think fondly of it.’

The Princess of Wales and Bellamy grew up ‘ten minutes from each other’ in Berkshire. ‘I think she seems so nice, and that what people love about her is the normality she brings to the royals. Whatever I read about her, from people who know her and from what’s out there, it’s always that what you see is what you get with her. It’s not a front that she puts up — she is genuinely easygoing and happy to talk to people, and that’s really admirable.’

Ahead of the release, Bellamy described how she underwent intensive training with movement and voice coaches – and even took costumes home.

‘I could bring home an outfit of Kate that really felt like her so I just kind of walked around the house and felt her,’ the actress explained. ‘And it is staggering how that changes how you walk, how you carry yourself because, you know, when you’re wearing low rise jeans and a vest top you really do hold yourself differently as to when I wear high rise jeans and baggy clothes. So that was really important and an integral part of the process.’

[From The Daily Mail]

I’m truly crying at the youths discovering low-rise jeans and midriff-baring tops. We probably won’t get to see Meg play Kate during the post-university Waity Years either, when Kate favored those Issa minidresses as she fell out of nightclubs. “She is genuinely easygoing and happy to talk to people, and that’s really admirable…” The thing is, even Kate’s most fervent defenders fully admit that she’s an awkward mess, not a bold, charismatic people-person. When most people meet Kate, they look startled by her jazz hands, freeze-posing, buttons and the gopher wigs. But again, none of that is Meg’s fault. I hope she isn’t forever associated with the Duchess of Karens.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.