Miss Flicks

The Crown season 5: Dominic West was miscast as Prince Charles

I blasted through season five of The Crown in the past few days and I have plenty of issues with it, but my main problem is Dominic West as Prince Charles.

I’ve seen headlines about people saying he’s “too hot” to play Charles and you can rest assured that’s not my angle – I don’t find West attractive – but I will agree that he’s too charming. Plus, he doesn’t look anything like Charles. The Crown stars aren’t supposed to look exactly like who they’re portraying – it’s not a documentary, after all, it’s a fictional drama inspired by real events and people – but you certainly hope for some likeness between the two. And there isn’t any.

But the biggest problem for me was the voice. West doesn’t even try to do Charles’ clipped RP accent, he just goes for generic posh. Why?! That should have been a prerequisite for the role. There are a couple of moments where he sounded a bit Charles, but by and large, he’s not as posh-sounding as he should be.

It doesn’t help that Josh O’Connor did such a fantastic job with Charles in the previous two seasons. He had some physical similarities (the ears!) and he got the voice so spot-on that if I closed my eyes, I thought I was listening to the royal himself. West is a massive downgrade from O’Connor in terms of believability and I never bought into him being Charles. I was always like “that’s Dominic West”.

But he’s not the only offender. Jonathan Pryce also just did his own voice rather than trying to have a go at Prince Philip, which is another disappointment considering Tobias Menzies absolutely nailed the Duke of Edinburgh’s voice in the previous two seasons. It was uncanny!

While those are the most glaringly obvious, I do feel like all the cast of The Crown sound less posh than in previous seasons. Nobody sounds as quite RP as usual and that’s just odd.

My favourite of this season was Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana, while I would have liked more of Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret. Her confrontation scene with the Queen was one of the standout moments of this series. Imelda Staunton was fine as the Queen but she’ll never match up to Claire Foy for me and I felt like she didn’t have that much to do.

Perhaps it’s because of the narrower timeframe (it spans just under six years) and the fact they decided to make it six seasons instead of five, but this series felt slower than usual and quite dull in places. Sure, it has some spectacular moments (Charles and Diana’s marriage ‘autopsy’ springs to mind) but I never would have expected such a juicy-seeming season to be quite so boring. Let’s hope the final instalment makes up for that.

The Crown S5 is streaming on Netflix now