The Royal Episode 7: When William Met Kate 

Welcome to the royal family, Kate Middleton. On the seventh episode of the final season of The Crown, “Alma Mater,” we are finally introduced to the girl who’d eventually steal Prince William’s heart—not without the help of her enterprising mother, Carole Middleton. Below, Still Watching hosts Hillary Busis, Richard Lawson, and Chris Murphy chat all things William, Kate, and Carole. Plus, Murphy talks with Ed McVey about booking this life-changing role of Prince William.

At long last, The Crown showcases Kate and William’s budding romance in this episode. Their friendship began after they both matriculated at St. Andrews in the early aughts. But according to The Crown, there was a third player heavily involved in the pair’s courtship: Kate’s party-supply business entrepreneur mother, Carole Middleton, played by Eve Best. “I thought it was so much fun how much they actually paid attention to the calculated nature of Kate’s courtship with William,” says Lawson.

Busis highlighted the couple’s cold-open meet-cute, which takes place when the two are teens and features a brief cameo from Elizabeth Debicki’s Princess Diana. As the episode unfolds, it’s revealed that Carole convinced Kate to take the same gap year trips as Prince William, to attend the less-prestigious St. Andrews instead of the University of Edinburgh, and to dump her college boyfriend to shoot her shot with the future King of England. “It’s like a conspiracy theory, but the show is bearing out that that is exactly what happened,” says Busis. “[Carole] actually did decide, when her daughter was a teenager, [that she was] going to meet William and make him fall in love with her.” 

Murphy, who found himself actively missing Best’s Carole when she was offscreen, couldn’t help but draw a parallel between the meddling Middleton mother and Salim Dau’s helicopter parent, Mohamed Al-Fayed. “We spent so much of the first three or four episodes talking about Mohamed Al-Fayed and his master manipulation plan to get Dodi and While Carole was ultimately successful in her quest to get Kate to ditch the zero and get with the hero, there was plenty of awkwardness along the way—particularly in an interaction at the library between Kate, William, and Lola Ardell Cavendish Kincaid, a character meant to represent several William’s pre-Kate flings. “If you want to know more about William’s actual girlfriends, you can, of course, read all about them in Vanity Fair,” notes Busis, shouting out a story from December 2010, “Wills and the Real Girl,” by sometime Still Watching guest and VF royal correspondent, Katie Nicholl.Diana together. But he doesn’t hold a candle to Carole,” says Murphy. “She made it happen.”

McVey, who plays the fictional college-age Prince William on The Crown, also dropped by the podcast to chat about what it’s like playing the heir to the throne. Quite surprisingly, McVey never thought he looked all that much like Prince William before portraying the future monarch on The Crown. “I only get it at certain times now,” the actor says. “I think it’s only if I have a shaved face, and my hair is a certain way. Even when I got cast, people were like, ‘Oh, yeah? I kind of see it. But they’ll do your hair and everything, right?"

Despite arguably not being the spitting image of the young monarch, McVey is uncanny as Prince William. “I wasn’t alive when Diana died. I was born in ’99, so I think I was one or two and three around the bulk of the timeline of the show," he says. “But then again, that in and of itself is very helpful. I didn’t really have any preconceptions of what the timeline was supposed to be, [and] I didn’t have any emotional connections to it. I didn’t read it in the tabloids or anything. I just had the words that Peter [Morgan] wrote, which were perfect.”

As for playing Prince William at arguably the height of his popularity in the “Willsmania” years, McVey says the experience prepared him for the whirlwind he’s experienced since joining The Crown’s cast. “A lot of what the character’s going through, I could mirror in terms of energy with what was going on in my life,” says McVey. “The character’s very much stepping out into this world stage that he’s not really prepared for—all the eyes are on him. This show is an incredible part of the culture and has had incredible actors go through it, and still does. The pressure of living up to the institution of The Crown as a show and also the institution of the monarchy and being future monarch—a lot of those energies I could sort of mirror.”

For more on William, Kate, and Carole; Click on ROYAL.