Dominic West’s Insight: Navigating the Media Storm Surrounding Lily James Kiss Controversy

Dominic West

Dominic West has admitted his own experiences of being the centre of a media storm helped inform his portrayal of a younger  King Charles in the final two seasons of  The Crown . Way back in 2020, the Bafta winner and his The Pursuit Of Love co-star  Lily James were caught on camera looking very cosy during … a break in filming in Rome. The photos went viral on social media, and Dominic and his wife Catherine FitzGerald were later seen outside their home in a very staged paparazzi photoshoot in which he snogged his wife’s face off on his doorstep while clutching a note that read “Our marriage is strong and we’re very much still together.
Dominic West /As part of his new interview with the Sunday Times, “The Crown” actor was asked whether the experience “fed into his performance” as the future King. “Definitely,” he said. “I’d had a very acute understanding of what it’s like to feel the horror of your name or your photograph coming up in the newspapers,” he revealed. “There is that dreadful freezing moment when something is being revealed about you. I think anyone can understand how that feels. But I’d been through it a couple of years previously and it must have informed how I approached it. That gut feeling of horror isn’t something you get inured to.
Dominic also added, later in the interview: “I hesitate to be so presumptuous as to speak on my wife’s behalf, because it was obviously horrible, particularly for her. But we do joke about it sometimes.
“Because whenever we went out together, the papers would always say we were ‘putting on a show of unity’. Even if we’d just been rowing about parking the car, as we were on that day, or about whatever else. Even if it couldn’t be further from the truth. And so when we go out we do sort of say, ‘Shall we go and have a show of unity up in London? Let’s get up there Mr Tumble, put on the clown suit and tape our nostrils together’.
“Pretty absurd situation. Deeply stressful for my wife and my kids, but lighter moments, too.”
In the final two seasons of The Crown, Dominic Sherwood played Prince Charles in his later years, from the late ’70s through the end of the twentieth century. His final appearance as Charles is in the final episode of season six, when he confronts Camilla Parker Bowles about “Tampongate” – the recording of his private phone calls by a former valet, which led to the famous “Camillagate” scandal. Sherwood says he felt “protective” of the monarch after playing him in both seasons, admitting: “I think he gets a lot of flak, less so perhaps now, but I do feel a bit protective of him. Just because I think he has been heroic in many ways.