In a totally fascinating crossover of worlds, Dominic West (who plays the then Prince Charles on Netflix’s The Crown) and Prince Harry were once friends—before West was cut off by Harry for apparently saying too much in an interview.
“We sort of [lost touch because] I said too much in a press conference, and so we didn’t speak after that,” West said on a recent episode of “Sunday Morning” on Times Radio, and per Us Weekly.
After being pressed by host Kate McCann to elaborate on the subject, West explained that their falling out occurred a year after they returned from a Walking with the Wounded charity event in 2013—a trip with injured veterans through Antarctica. The timeline confirms that West’s role as Harry’s father on The Crown had nothing to do with the fallout, which would have taken place in 2014; the show didn’t even premiere on Netflix until 2016, and West didn’t portray Charles for years after that. The aforementioned press conference happened in 2014.
Of the Antarctica trip, Harry “was very much part of the team,” West said in 2014. “He seemed to specialize in building latrines. He built this incredible castellated structure with blocks to keep out the wind, and it even had a [toilet] roll holder.” He elaborated further, per People, adding “They had a flagpole and a loo roll holder that were surrounded by blocks of snow. He must have taken 45 minutes to create each one.” Providing a bit more detail than we ever probably needed, West further explained that Harry would dig a hole at the chosen spot along with a “platform to squat on. He built these incredibly intricate ones. He did art A level [in high school]—you can tell he has the artistic touch.” West then added “I’d be sitting there, looking at a beautiful view thinking, ‘This is the royal flush!’” (Wine not included with this cheese.) West also revealed that Harry told “eye-wateringly rude jokes. For the non-soldier like me, it was quite shocking.” So, okay, yeah, a bit of an overshare—but it doesn’t stop there.
Reflecting on those 2014 comments in the recent Times Radio interview, West—who called Harry a “really cool guy”—said “I think I was asked what we did. [And] what we did to celebrate when we got there, and [I] probably said too much.”
Of their celebration, The Daily Mail reports he said “Two of the Aussie guys stripped naked and ran ‘round the pole, but most of us, Harry included, just went on a two-day bender with the Icelandic truck drivers who had brought some lethal home brew with them. There was a lot of liqueur drunk.” He added that they “all drank champagne” out of the “favorite prosthetic leg” of Duncan Slater, a double amputee who was injured in Afghanistan in 2009.
Harry, for his part, kept the details of the trip much more PG: per Page Six, he told the press at the time that the trip demonstrated to “those who have suffered life-changing injuries that anything is still possible” and that it was an “unbelievable achievement by everyone behind me.”
West further explained that he and Harry’s friendship ended “over 10 years ago,” so he wasn’t able to ask Harry for advice on how to play Charles on The Crown. Of playing the then Prince of Wales, West said “I suppose one’s perception is so dictated by what you read in the media and what you see in their public persona that working on trying to find out what’s going on privately and what’s going on in their minds and what’s going on in their private conversations. Peter [Morgan] imagines them so brilliantly and base grounds them very firmly in whatever facts we have that I suppose I came to empathize much more, certainly, with Charles and feel a sympathy for him.”
Of The Crown, Harry—who, of course, also has a close working relationship with Netflix—told James Corden on The Late Late Show in 2021 that “it gives you a rough idea about what that lifestyle, what the pressures of putting duty and service above family and everything else, what can come from that. I’m way more comfortable with The Crown than I am seeing the stories written about my family, or my wife, or myself.”
