Princess Diana and Kate Middleton never met – but The Crown rewrites history with faked scene

The final episodes in the last season of The Crown have finally arrived, revealing how the hit Netflix drama’s depiction of the late Queen Elizabeth II has come to an end.

Ever since the TV series created by Peter Morgan premiered in 2016, it has combined fact with creative freedom by interweaving historical events with imagined dialogue, inspired by the real members of the royal family depicted in the story.

In season 6 part 2, the introduction of a young Kate Middleton features the teenager having a face-to-face conversation with Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki)… which seemingly never happened.

Metro.co.uk had the chance to speak to new members of the cast Meg Bellamy (Kate Middleton), Ed McVey (Prince William) and Luther Ford (Prince Harry), during which they addressed filming exchanges that weren’t based on real interactions.

During our conversation, we brought up the aforementioned scene, which takes place in the opening moments of episode seven, with a young Kate (Ella Bright), a young William (Rufus Kampa), Princess Diana and Kate’s mother, Carole Middleton (Eve Best).

Despite the real Kate stating that she never had the chance to meet Diana, the scene shows her and the late Princess having a short conversation as she also crosses paths with William for the first time, before their actual first meeting at the University of St Andrews.

It’s understood Diana and Kate never met in real life – but that’s not the case in The Crown (Picture: Netflix)

The trio of young actors posed together at the London finale celebration (Picture: Samir Hussein/WireImage)

We asked the trio of actors how they found acting out scenes that were written specifically for the drama, in comparison to those based on real-life interactions.

‘I kind of see it all as the drama because it’s all the script,’ answered Meg.

‘Especially because there’s no footage of Kate and no necessarily historical events that we recreate. It’s all, for me, written for the drama.

‘So I guess you have to take it from an acting point of view and then just work on the character, and the real research with the real life comes from just characterisation, I guess. That was my experience of it.’

Ed explained that there was only one scene throughout his time on The Crown for which he needed to rely on archive footage – when Prince William gave a press conference about going on a gap year.

Nonetheless, he did catch himself thinking about fans putting together ‘side-by-sides’, when they compare scenes from the TV drama to real life.

The Crown’s final episodes show Kate and William taking special notice in one another at university, despite dating other people before getting together (Picture: Netflix/PA Wire)

Prince Harry, Prince William and Kate Middleton attending the Six Nations match between England and Italy at Twickenham in February 2007 (Picture: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)

Ed stressed that while it can be ‘good to have that archive footage’, as actors, they want to avoid it looking as though they’re ‘doing an impression’ of an individual.

‘But also you’re thinking about the side-by-sides,’ he continued.

‘You don’t want to do something completely different because people are going to do those side-by-sides, so you kind of have to be like, okay, I studied that clip – how can I take that body language in that moment but also throughout the series?

‘It was, I think, harder doing the archive stuff because that’s probably the closest you’ll get to the real person, in a sense. It’s a lot easier just having a script and you can just do what you want to do with it and not think about it too much.’

One can imagine it would have been daunting for any actor to be cast in the final season of an epic, globally-watched TV series of as big a magnitude as The Crown.

Ed revealed his auditioning process took around six months following an open casting call, while Meg spotted the application on Twitter and had several months before filming began.

Princess Diana’s death was depicted in the first half of The Crown season six, after she died aged 36 in 1997 following a fatal car crash (Picture: Getty)

Luther’s auditioning process, on the other hand, took just three weeks, with production getting underway in around a month in what he described as a ‘crazy’ experience.

When asked whether there was pressure considering they were portraying people who might end up watching the programme, the Prince Harry actor acknowledged that there was.

‘There is pressure, there is pressure. Of course there is, but it’s not useful. It’s not useful. So if you can discard it, that’s the best thing to be able to do.’

Meg added: ‘The only way I used it was as motivation to just research them authentically, but I think we were always going to do that,’ while Ed explained that he was find a level of ‘detachment’ from Prince William, considering he didn’t watch the royal grow up.

‘It was nice me not growing up with these… I didn’t watch these people grow up. So there’s a level of detachment, which was really, really helpful. You can just sort of weigh into what Peter wrote and make that character for yourself, and not think about it too much.’

The Crown is available to watch on Netflix.

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The final episodes have been released.