The upcoming season of The Crown will cover some of the most highly publicised (and criticised) moments from Charles’ life, including the now infamous ‘tampon-gate’ phone call to Camilla, now Queen Consort. At the time of the R rated incident, Charles was still married to Diana and would be for another three years until 1996.
West said his views about the infamous incident had changed after making The Crown, describing the R-rated conversation as “sweet” rather than “filthy.”
“My memory of it is that it was sort of filthy and dirty and really embarrassing, but actually, in the playing of it, it was much more like two middle-aged lovers being sweet to each other,” West said.
“If any one of us had our intimate phone conversations reproduced verbatim in every newspaper in the world, imagine what that’s like.
“Imagine how awful that is.
“It just strikes you as being a horrible breach of privacy that no one should have to suffer.”
The actor, also known for his roles in The Wire, Stateless, and The Affair, said he felt sympathy for both Charles and Camilla in the wake of the scandal.
At the time of the incident in 1993, the English press published a full transcript of the six-minute-long telephone conversation.
“It was just an intensely personal conversation, and what was sordid was the prurient interest in it,” West said.
Given his stance on the matter, West has found himself a royal fan in none other than Camilla herself, caught on the record saying that West was the “perfect choice” to play her husband, even jokingly referring to him as “your majesty” when she saw the actor at a party in 2021.
