For Ed McVey, playing Prince William in the longstanding royal drama series The Crown, and surrounded by legendary actors, is just the start.

Photography by Nick Thompson
Styled by Oliver Volquardsen

For an actor, joining the ever-changing cast of <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/royal-tiaras-the-crown-queen-elizabeth-princess-diana" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Crown</a> can be a bit like strapping your career to a rocket ship. The popular Netflix drama is such strong catnip for awards season that it has its own Wikipedia page just for the list of awards and accolades it has garnered. Josh O&rsquo;Connor as Prince Charles; <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/emma-corrin-cover-miu-miu-fashion" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Emma Corrin</a> as Princess Diana; <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/vanessa-kirby-napoleon-empress-josephine-ridley-scott" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Vanessa Kirby</a> as Princess Margaret; <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/the-crown-netflix-hair-makeup-olivia-colman" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Olivia Colman</a>, Imelda Staunton, and Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth: They all won Emmys, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/2024-golden-globe-nominations-awards" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Golden Globes</a>, BAFTAs, and SAG Awards for their thrilling performances.
So to say that landing a role on The Crown is a dream for any actor might be something of an understatement. It was certainly on Ed McVey&rsquo;s wishlist, though he never thought it would be possible.
&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been a fan of the show since it started, and it was one of those shows that I was like, If I could be on that show at any point, that would be amazing. It was very much the kind of work I wanted to be doing,&rdquo; he says over Zoom, hair still slicked back from his just-wrapped L&rsquo;OFFICIEL USA shoot. &ldquo;But I thought, Those characters are already getting older, so that&rsquo;s never going to happen. I didn&rsquo;t even think about the younger royals.&rdquo;
Fortunately for McVey, The Crown&rsquo;s showrunner Peter Morgan very much was thinking about the younger royals, and he was in need of a Prince William. McVey&mdash;who happens to bear a remarkable resemblance to young Wills circa his St Andrews years, the era captured in the second part of the show&rsquo;s sixth and final season&mdash;was quick to submit a tape to an open casting.

&ldquo;You never think these things are going to happen, because they&rsquo;re seeing 10,000 tapes by people that you assume look so much more like the character than you do, but you put the tape in and you sort of forget about it,&rdquo; McVey says.
But after several auditions over the course of six months, McVey was chosen to play Prince William. It&rsquo;s his first on-screen role, the only thing currently listed on his IMDb page. He became interested in acting when he was young, and was lucky enough to attend a school that had a great drama department and where being in the drama program was considered cool. Being on stage clicked with McVey fast. &ldquo;I really liked entertaining people, and I really liked that center-of-attention type stuff&mdash;which hasn&rsquo;t changed,&rdquo; he says with a big grin.
Other schoolwork was challenging, but McVey found that he enjoyed the work he had to put into acting, so he kept at it with his parents&rsquo; encouragement. It was only a couple of years ago that he was a student at the Drama Centre in London; fresh out of that, he landed a gig understudying the male lead of Camp Siegfried at the famous Old Vic theater.

That was the extent of his experience prior to joining the world of The Crown, and he was thrown in head-first: The very first scene he shot, alongside Luther Ford as young <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop-culture/young-prince-harry-real-father-last-name" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Prince Harry</a>, happened with a lineup of Britain&rsquo;s finest actors serving as &ldquo;glorified extras&rdquo; in his shot.
&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll never forget my first day because it was in this big, ex-royal building&mdash;it felt very Crown very quickly. You&rsquo;ve got Imelda Staunton, Jonathan Pryce, Dominic West: Everyone&rsquo;s there, but they don&rsquo;t say anything. They don&rsquo;t talk at all,&rdquo; McVey explains, still slightly awed by the experience. &ldquo;We spend all day doing this two-hander scene, and you&rsquo;re just freaking out! You&rsquo;re making them stand in the background of our shot&mdash;but that&rsquo;s just how it works, and they understood that; no one was complaining. It was just, for me....&rdquo;
The idea of no less than the highly acclaimed Staunton standing around so he can act is mind-blowing to him even now.
&ldquo;She&rsquo;s got all dressed up. She&rsquo;s had to come in early in the morning; I&rsquo;ve had to wake her up just to sit in the corner and not really do anything,&rdquo; he jokes. &ldquo;That will always stay with me, forever.&rdquo;

Even after settling into what the job required, it wasn&rsquo;t an experience McVey took for granted. It would be something like sacrilege to choose just one favorite memory from the six months spent filming. &ldquo;Every single day, I would pinch myself,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d find myself in a building or on a set or working with these incredible actors, and you&rsquo;re just like, This is an absolute dream come true.&rdquo;
(Although, fine, there was the time he played air hockey with Pryce. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll take that one to my grave. That was amazing,&rdquo; he says.)
Ask him about the work he put into playing Prince William, though, and it&rsquo;s immediately evident that McVey is perfectly capable of keeping up with all those legends. The heir to the throne is one of the first royals to have so much of his life captured on camera, so McVey had plenty of material to pull from The Crown&rsquo;s research team provided him with a packet about an inch thick, rich with references to real-life events that informed the scripts.
McVey was careful to keep to the timeline of the show&mdash;he plays Prince William only up to around 2005&mdash;and put in plenty of work with vocal trainers to get the voice just right. But when it came time to shoot, he didn&rsquo;t put pressure on himself to be the perfect embodiment of Prince William on film.

"I&rsquo;d find myself in a building or on a set or working with these incredible actors, and you&rsquo;re just like,&nbsp;This is an absolute dream come true.&rdquo;

&ldquo;What I really didn&rsquo;t want to do is some hammy impression of someone,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather not be an exact carbon copy of the real person, but it&rsquo;s a truthful rendition of what the script demanded.&rdquo;
Most important to McVey was getting the movement just right, &ldquo;especially aging the character, because I start William when he&rsquo;s about 16-17, and I take him up to like 24-25. Obviously, for a young man, a lot changes physically and mentally in that span of time.&rdquo; He worked with The Crown&rsquo;s movement coach Polly Bennett (dubbed &ldquo;an absolute legend&rdquo; by McVey), to create a narrative for Prince William using his body.
&ldquo;The physicality I wanted to introduce early: Have him start in a certain place and then end in a certain place, and for that to match up psychologically,&rdquo; McVey explains. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what really, really excited me about the role and getting able to play those years.&rdquo;
Now all that&rsquo;s left is for the world to get its first glimpse of what McVey is capable of doing as an actor&mdash;no big deal. The Crown has turned many of its cast members from working actors to bonafide stars, but McVey isn&rsquo;t thinking about any of that. Instead, in a sage move, he&rsquo;s taking it one day at a time.
&ldquo;I get told that a lot, Your life&rsquo;s gonna change, but I don&rsquo;t necessarily know what that looks like, so I try not to think about it too much,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;You can make assumptions about things, and then if they don&rsquo;t come through, or it was much harder than you thought it was going to be, or much easier than you thought it was going to be, it can mess with your head a little bit.&rdquo;

Still, it&rsquo;s an incredibly promising start for any young actor. &ldquo;This was something that I&rsquo;d always dreamed of doing in terms of this scale, but I thought, with the sort of arrogance that comes with that, I would be doing this a lot later in my career. I didn&rsquo;t think it would happen so quickly,&rdquo; he admits.
Everything is still so fresh, and McVey has plenty of space to navigate what he wants his career to look like&mdash;he could definitely head in the <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop-culture/phoebe-bridgers-paul-mescal-dating-relationship-timeline" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Paul Mescal</a> direction, an actor whose career he cites as inspiration. He&rsquo;d like to do something involving motion capture or something involving loads of prosthetics. Period pieces are definitely on the table, as are more naturalistic dramas like The Crown. He&rsquo;d love a role in a Christopher Nolan epic or Safdie brothers movie, and he&rsquo;s keeping his eye on other indie directors, too.
There&rsquo;s no exact goal at the moment, with all the possibilities ahead of him. The only thing McVey is absolutely sure of is that he wants to stay connected to the theater world, and he dreams of performing on some of London&rsquo;s most iconic stages: The Almeida, the National, the Donmar, a return to the Old Vic. And Broadway of course. Anything that allows him to tap into that side of performing will make him happy.
&ldquo;That is something very special to me, and it&rsquo;s getting more and more special,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s something that you can get your head into, and you can get into a zone where everything else falls away. It&rsquo;s just such an incredible feeling when you can feel an audience is experiencing something for the first time.&rdquo;

The day of his L&rsquo;OFFICIEL USA photoshoot, though, McVey is still in that in-between space, suspended between the filming of The Crown and the release of his work into the world. Things are already ramping up for him: He&rsquo;s got an intense schedule of promo, and with the SAG-AFTRA strike finally lifted, his first major press tour looms on the horizon.
&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got an amazing team around me and lots of very close loved ones, a very tight circle of amazing people. I&rsquo;ve got a really good support network that really cares,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I loved the whole process, so getting to talk about it and getting to celebrate it is just such a lovely thing.&rdquo;
&ldquo;I mean, we&rsquo;ll see what I&rsquo;m like the twelfth day into a junket, and I can&rsquo;t bear to look at my face anymore,&rdquo; he adds with a laugh. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;m very excited to share it with people. I&rsquo;m very excited to celebrate it as much as possible because people worked very hard on it.&rdquo;

GROOMING Petra Sellge using Patrick&rsquo;s PRODUCTION Alexandra Oley RETOUCHING Colorworkz

Ed McVey Takes on the Next Generation of Royals in 'The Crown'

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