The Crown’s Dominic West Recalls Recreating That Tampon Scandal

The Crown isn’t shying away from even the most scandalous of the monarchy’s controversies. 

Ahead of season five, Dominic West, who will be portraying a younger King Charles III (then still Prince Charles) as his marriage to Princess Diana unravels, has teased how the show will be tackling the couple’s infamous 1993 “Camillagate” scandal, in which a leaked audio recording revealed Charles saying that he wanted to “live inside” Camilla’s trousers, but with his luck, he’d be reincarnated as her tampon. 

“I remember thinking it was something so sordid and deeply, deeply embarrassing [at the time],” West told Entertainment Weekly in a feature published Oct. 18. “Looking back on it, and having to play it, what you’re conscious of is that the blame was not with these two people, two lovers, who were having a private conversation. What’s really [clear now] is how invasive and disgusting was the press’s attention to it, that they printed it out verbatim and you could call a number and listen to the actual tape.”

West went on to say that reenacting the scene with costar Olivia Williams, who will play Camilla in season five, made him “extremely sympathetic towards the two of them and what they’d gone through.”