Netflix’s devastating Prince Harry move
New photos reveal how painful the next few months will be for the Duke of Sussex whose Netflix arrangement is already in the doldrums.
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Join me now in uttering a couple of words that don’t crop up all that often around here: Poor Harry.
Born a prince, raised in the grandest homes imaginable, educated at the most prestigious boys’ school in the world, married to an absolute stunner, father of two and now the only titled owner of a hummingbird feeder in history – and yet still, all of that privilege and wealth and excellent dentistry and Netflix is still willing to screw him over.
On Tuesday, the streamer released a new series of photos from the sixth and final season of The Crown, with the first tranche of episodes, covering the lead up to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, available in November, and then the second lot, dealing with the fallout, available in December.
And so, let us turn our attention to one particular image that recreates a moment that took place in summer 1997, two and a bit weeks before Diana’s fatal trip to Paris. In the shot we have Dominic West imbuing his Prince Charles with a dishiness the real prince has never possessed, Rufus Kampa recreating Prince William’s slightly bashful and awkward gangly adolescence and young Welsh actor Fflyn Edwards giving us something of a pantomime Prince Harry.
As is being pointed out over on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, there is more than a hint of the gormless Ron Weasley to Edward’s Harry.
(This is not to criticise Edwards in the least, but whoever cast a child that does not bear much resemblance to the real Harry and whichever crew member then picked out the too-bright rug to stick on his head.)
However, that Kmart wig is just the beginning of the bad news for the real life, now Duke of Sussex.
Most obviously, this season, more than any other from the show’s seven year run, is going to represent a wholesale dredging up of the most traumatic and painful period in both Harry and William’s lives for public entertainment value.
That new Crown still featuring ‘Charles’, ‘William’, and ‘Harry’ reconstructs a photo call that took place on August 12, 1997.
William and Harry were staying at their Granny’s modest 50,000-acre Scottish Highlands estate, the royal family’s annual summer bond-a-thon, an perennial opportunity for Charles to sun his knees in a kilt and for the princes to try and teach Prince Philp how to use a Sega.
Diana, explaining the appeal of Balmoral to a friend, said, according to biographer Tina Brown, said of her sons, “They do all those manly, killing things, and there’s that wonderful go-kart track.”
The princess, meanwhile, and for the second time that month, had headed off to bob around the Med on a super yacht with her new bloke, playboy and T-shirt-under-a-blazer champion, Dodi Al-Fayed.
It was during William and Harry’s time in Scotland that that photo call took place and when a horde of British snappers, journalists and their collective HP-sauce stained shirts tried not to slip into the River Dee.
As veteran royal photographer Arthur Edwards later said of time, “The princes were inseparable, solid for one another. They looked so relaxed, having fun together on that summer holiday.”
If things had turned out differently, if weeks later Diana and Dodi had not decided to spend the final night of their getaway in Paris, that press call would today be lost in Fleet Street’s dusty photo negative archives.
Instead, the rest is heartbreaking history.
In the 2017 documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy both brothers recalled their last conversation with their mum.
“It was her speaking from Paris, I can’t really necessarily remember what I said but all I do remember is probably regretting for the rest of my life how short the phone call was,” Harry said in the doco.
What this means is that the new Crown might not just delve into just William and Harry’s profound loss but their remorse too. Talk about an emotional Pandora’s box being blithely opened for the sake of Emmy’s by the bucketload.
But wait, there’s more – heartache for Harry that is.
The Telegraph has revealed this week that one of the season’s overarching themes will be Queen Camilla’s renaissance, with her going from being the most hated woman in Britain to having her face slapped on all over commemorative stamps.
The paper’s royal editor Victoria Ward reports that “The Crown encapsulates the newly crowned Queen’s completed rehabilitation.”
A source has told Ward that show creator Peter Morgan has no need to do any sort of sequel because the new season’s “last five or six episodes bring you right up to the present day. You’re actually watching this rehabilitated Queen Camilla figure.”
This particular storyline would have to surely grate on Harry, at the very least, given he has not exactly held back in telling the world what he really thinks of his stepmother.
In Spare he writes that he believed that Camilla had “sacrificed me on her personal PR altar. … Maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy?”
Quizzed by 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper about the “dangerous” reference, Harry explained that because of her “need for her to rehabilitate her image” that “made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press … on the way to being Queen consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street because of that.”
Yet, the depiction of Camilla that Netflix sounds like it’s about to put forth is one that seems like it will be nothing short of a triumphal narrative arc for the 76-year-old.
How must it feel for Harry to know that perhaps the biggest mass rewriting and revamping of his “dangerous” stepmother’s image is about to be undertaken by the very same company that Harry and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex work for (at least sometimes) too?
In what might be one of the greatest ironies to ever befall an HRH, the same billion-dollar business that is taking the duke’s childhood pain and turning it into pop culture pap also now helps foot the bill for the Sussexes’ California idyll.
Just to tot things up here: Not only does he now face having his suffering revived and splashed all over the screen, not only does the young actor playing him appear to be wearing a comical hairpiece, but all of these blows are the handiwork of his employer.
Harry and Meghan might have fought to build their own lives, unfettered by protocol or tutting courtiers or the pressure to buy in bulk pairs of nude hose, but in moments like this with The Crown, I wonder, just how ‘free’ are they really?
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Netflix’s devastating Prince Harry move
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