Honor Swinton Byrne deeply and truly believed that she had buggered up her audition to play Princess Beatrice in the new Prime Video miniseries A Very Royal Scandal. (That’s the term she uses—buggered—and she uses it twice: “I was so nervous. I didn’t think I looked like her. I was like, I don’t know—I’m not really what they’re looking for. And really kind of buggered up, buggered up, that audition.”) Right after, she met her boyfriend at the nearby pub for a pint. “It’s okay, I didn’t want it, anyway,” she told him through tears. But a few days later, she received a phone call: She’d got it.
Byrne had done her research for the role in the film, which dramatizes Beatrice’s father Prince Andrew’s disastrous interview with BBC journalist Emily Maitlis (yes, like Netflix’s Scoop from earlier in the year, except that A Very Royal Scandal is told from Maitlis’s perspective, rather than talent booker Sam McAlister’s). She watched old documentaries about the royal family, like The Queen at 90, and other public interviews to study Beatrice’s mannerisms. “She comes across as warm and a little bit nervous sometimes,” she says. Then, she tried to determine what that personality looked like when the cameras were off. “I just wanted a more private side of her, this slightly more melancholic, slightly less on energy,”
Okay, so she was prepared, and the audition clearly went well. What’s all this about buggering up, then? Byrne admits that it’s just her insecurity talking. “I struggle with that weird thing of sitting in a room with lots of other people auditioning for the same role. That’s when I get my imposter syndrome.”
Yet she has acting in her blood: Byrne is the daughter of Tilda Swinton, an Oscar winner considered among the greatest thespians of her generation. When she was eight, she visited her mother on the set of Michael Clayton. “I remember she would be doing something slightly different in every take. I said, ‘Oh, you did something different’ or asked her, ‘Why did you do it like that?’” Byrne recalls. Her mom responded: “Oh, it’s nice to give some range.” So going forward, Byrne always tried to do that too.
At first, it was during rehearsals for her school plays just outside Inverness in Scotland. She played Ariel in The Tempest and Abigail in The Crucible. After seeing her in The Crucible, her mother’s agent signed her. In 2019, she had her breakthrough role in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, as Julie, a young film student who has an affair with a moneyed heroin addict. (Swinton, a longtime friend of Hogg’s, played a supporting role as Julie’s mother.) It was followed by a sequel in 2021.
Byrne took a step back from acting while attending Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where she studied psychology. (She also picked up part-time work as a florist, which mostly involved arrangements for weddings around the Scottish Highlands.) Now, however, she’s ready to return to the camera.
In December, she had a small role in The Crown, playing a fantastically snobby (fictional) girlfriend of Prince William’s, Lola Airdale-Cavendish-Kincaid. Soon after, she booked Beatrice.
Byrne doesn’t know why, exactly, she keeps being cast as posh girls. But she does have two theories. The first? She sounds posh, which, as she Zooms with me from London, I can confirm. The second? “Someone once said I looked horsey—which I thought was a fucking insult,” she says, laughing.
To be clear: Byrne is not horsey. In fact, she can’t ride a horse to save her life. After being cast as Princess Beatrice, the showrunners informed her she’d need to ride a horse in one of her final scenes. So she took lessons upon lessons. She watched instructional videos. She even tried bonding with her animal! The horse was a ginger, and Byrne, who had to dye her hair for the part, was now also a ginger. But alas: “I was so bad at it that they had to get a stunt double,” she says. “[Beatrice] is meant to come across like this princess that rides every day and loves it”—but that wasn’t quite landing.
I’m here, however, to offer a third theory for Byrne’s typecasting: She’s simply…good at it? Posh characters can be difficult to root for, but in Byrne’s hands, one recognizes both their privilege and humanity. In A Very Royal Scandal—which presents the Yorks as frankly loathsome characters, and deservedly so—she deftly handles Beatrice’s blind spots without making her into a cartoon villain.
She’s never met the princess, by the way. “I hope I do in the far future, when this has died down a wee bit,” Byrne says before pausing. “And she hopefully doesn’t recognize me or know who I am.”
The way Byrne’s career is going, though? That seems unlikelier by the day.
A Very Royal Scandal streams on Prime Video from September 19.
