Tom Byrne on playing Prince Andrew in The Crown: Helicopters, headbutting Olivia Colman and avoiding Newsnight

The Crown S4
tombyrne0311
Matt Holyoak/Netflix

“The Sun ran a headline which made me laugh,” Tom Byrne grins. “It was ‘Worst part on TV?’ Good news, you’re in The Crown; bad news, you’re playing Prince Andrew.”

Well, quite. Landing a role in Netflix’s sumptuous royal saga, now in its fourth series, is surely a dream gig for any young actor - the show, after all, has become a finishing school for British screen talent, helping to launch alumni like Claire Foy and Vanessa Kirby into Hollywood. But when that role is playing the 20-something incarnation of the Queen’s second son, now notorious for his friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and that car crash Newsnight interview, does it take some of the shine off?

26-year-old newcomer Byrne, a graduate of Bristol Old Vic Theatre School whose previous screen roles have been brief turns in Sky’s A Discovery of Witches and Netflix’s Black Mirror, originally auditioned to play Prince Charles, a part eventually taken by Josh O’Connor for series three and four. The show’s team then got back in touch when it came to casting the young Duke of York, and The Crown’s reputation as a definitively big deal loomed large. “I’d had about half a year of not much happening - it’d been quite a quiet time for me, and I’d built this thing up massively in my head,” he explains, speaking over Zoom from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, where he is currently filming. “And then I went in and I completely blew it, really f**ked it.”

He had already “chalked [the audition] up as the big professional failure of [his] life” when the good news finally rolled in a couple of months later - leaving him with just weeks to nail the young prince’s specific timbre of RP. “William, who’s our dialect coach, said: ‘You’re talking through a letterbox and you’ve got massive teeth,’” Byrne laughs. “So that was my mantra for getting into it.”

Byrne plays the Prince in his twenties
Netflix

As filming began last autumn on series four, which sees screenwriter Peter Morgan explore the shaky foundations of Charles’ marriage to a young, painfully naive Princess Diana, real-life royal drama threatened to overshadow its on-screen imitation: Emily Maitlis’ now infamous interrogation of Prince Andrew aired on BBC One, just hours before The Crown's third season debuted on Netflix. “It was an odd time,” Byrne admits, adding that he made “a concerted effort to avoid” the headlines, video clips and, presumably, the flurry of fake Woking Pizza Express Trip Advisor reviews that followed the broadcast. “People are going to bring their perceptions of Prince Andrew to watch [him in] The Crown anyway, I didn’t need to bring my own judgement to it,” he says. “I thought the best thing I can do is to switch that part of my brain off. It just wasn’t useful to me to engage with that stuff - particularly as I was only playing [him as] a 20-year-old.”

The new series does, however, include an undeniable nod to present-day scandal. Discussing his relationship with a young American actress with his mother, one episode sees the young Andrew gleefully recount how his new girlfriend has recently starred as a 17-year-old targeted by “older, twisted predators” in a controversial film. It’s as close as screenwriter Peter Morgan gets to breaking the fourth wall, a grimly on-the-nose nudge to the viewer. Did it feel strange to play out a scene that’s so self-consciously dripping in dramatic irony? “Obviously that has a kind of a pallor attached to it,” Byrne says. “I was definitely aware of what Peter was doing [in that scene] - but I can also imagine a young 22-year-old guy just doing that to wind his mum up, [when] there was none of that stuff surrounding it.”

Morgan’s script, he adds, painted the young Prince as “someone who believes their potential to be boundless. He’s the Queen’s favourite son, in the most powerful, manically loved family on the planet, so you can imagine how that unassailable confidence might manifest.” He is, we’re led to imagine, someone who is not used to hearing ‘no’ for an answer - the kind of chap who would co-opt a military helicopter in order to pop in for a chat with Her Majesty (Morgan told Byrne to look at Top Gun and, hilariously, Buzz Lightyear for inspiration).

British Royalty - Prince Andrew - 1985
Prince Andrew served as naval helicopter pilot in the 80s
PA

That scene with the chopper, and all its “sturm und drang,” Byrne says, was great for getting him into that princely mindset, but less so for smoothing over his introduction to on-screen mum Olivia Colman. “I was getting out of the helicopter and I was wearing my helmet,” he explains. “She came over and hugged me, but just as she was coming in, I misjudged the distance and I just kind of... nutted her on the top of her head. I was thinking, ‘I’ve just headbutted Olivia Colman…’” Luckily, the Oscar winner slash national treasure “rode it off like a champ. It was like it didn’t happen. She’s very welcoming and warm and it really did settle my nerves - there’s no theatre around her.”

So many of Byrne’s co-stars have gushed about how their time on The Crown has given them a newfound appreciation for the Firm, and for the real-life royals they’ve played. That latter part will probably ring less true for Byrne (surely the occupational hazard of embodying someone for whom the word ‘royal’ is now prefixed with ‘disgraced’) - but though the idea of monarchy used to feel “like anathema” to him, he now feels “a lot more empathy for the institution of the royal family than I did before. That’s what the show has done - it’s taken these kind of alien people, who are impossible to empathise with, and humanised them.”

Series four of The Crown arrives on Netflix on November 15.

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