Meg Bellamy has a selfie that she won’t show me. As we sit and chat over sparkling waters at Rockefeller Center’s Pebble Bar, however, she agrees to describe the scene.
She’d taken it in the employee bathroom at Legoland Windsor. Her hair is disheveled beneath the fluorescent lights, her snake costume askew. (She doesn’t want to get too into it, but she’d just played a serpent in Ninjago, one of the theme park’s live productions—at the time, her most stable acting gig. “Can you repeat that?” I ask, not once but twice. “Ninjago—there’s shows for different Lego franchises and stuff,” Bellamy explains. I decide to just google it later.) Mascara-stained tears streak her cheeks. Her expression reflects both shell shock and triumph—the look of a person who had, just 15 minutes before, landed the role of a lifetime: Kate Middleton on season six of The Crown.
She got the call in Legoland’s delivery parking lot. Or, technically, she returned it there: When the then amateur actor checked her phone post-Ninjago, she had a voicemail from Kate Bone, a casting associate for The Crown. “No rush,” Bone said, “but when you have time to chat….”
Bellamy’s heart raced, her chest tightened. She’d been in touch with Bone since April 2022, when Bellamy first sent in a tape for the role of Kate Middleton. (“Robert Sterne, casting director of the Netflix series The Crown, is searching for an exceptional young actor to play Kate Middleton in the next [season],” read the open casting call, which quickly went viral on TikTok. “This is a good role in this award-winning drama, and we are looking for a strong physical resemblance.”)
Slowly but surely, Bellamy went from one of thousands, to one of hundreds, to one of eight. She and the future Prince William, Ed McVey, began to screen test together. In the weeks it took the casting department to tell them they’d made it to the next round, they anxiously texted each other: “I hope it’s you.”
Flash forward to the Legoland parking lot. Bellamy knew this was the phone call, the one that could change everything. Crouched between two delivery trucks, she returned it and received the big news. “I fully cried,” she admits. Then she ducked into a restroom to fix herself up, taking a selfie to help her soak it all in and “to slow my moment.”
But she also had a shift to finish. “I remember this guest came up to me and was like, ‘My skip-the-queue isn’t working.’ I was having to pretend to care, like, ‘Oh, no, I’m really gutted.’”
On September 2, 2022, Deadline broke the news of her and McVey’s casting with the headline “The Crown Finds Its William And Kate.” It received international attention—especially from the British tabloids, who leaped at the chance to dig up everything they could on the young performers. They didn’t find much: Bellamy was not only completely unknown but also, well, a teenager. Just 19 at the time, she had only graduated from high school a few months before. “I had applied to drama school, and I didn’t get in,” she says. “So instead I was working at Legoland in Windsor and applying for student films and short films.” With the Crown announcement came her first brush with publicity and her first experience as gossip fodder, all more than a year before the show aired.
To prepare for the part, Bellamy devoured everything she could about Middleton’s time at the University of St. Andrews—but nothing more. “I always stopped reading after she left university,” she says. “Obviously, the way that I play her, she doesn’t know that she’s going to marry William.” She then began her process of “de-royal-ifying” the current Princess of Wales. Before she started wearing labels like Alessandra Rich and Alexander McQueen, Kate Middleton went out in low-rise jeans and T-shirts. Before she assumed the rigid posture of a marionette doll, she likely slouched a little. (“She probably would be more relaxed around her uni mates in the flat,” Bellamy muses. “So it was kind of thinking about the context and her age as well.”) And while today’s Kate Middleton is the picture of discretion and propriety, college-aged Kate liked to party. “They have this thing in St. Andrews called Raisin Weekend,” Bellamy explains. “They all dress up in the fourth year as their parents, and all the first-years dress up as babies. She did that. And I just think you don’t expect that from a royal. You don’t expect that sense of fun.”
If, in 2023, Kate Middleton is one of the most famous women in the world, she is also among the most mysterious. Despite making hundreds of public appearances a year, she rarely delivers speeches, grants interviews, or ventures beyond small talk in a crowd. The dissonance is a little crazy making: We all know who Kate Middleton is, and yet we hardly know a thing about her.
It’s what has made us so hungry for personal details, however questionably sourced. Self-described royal experts write 300-page books claiming to know the real Kate, as social media fan accounts obsessively chronicle every element of her outfits, down to her shoes. And when members of the royal family participate in documentaries or interviews in which she’s so much as referenced, it becomes a major item in broadsheets and tabloid papers alike.
So when an award-winning, historical-fiction juggernaut like The Crown teases a glimpse at Kate Middleton’s backstory, it makes sense that the megawatt spotlight on the royal would capture Bellamy too. Photographers hid nearby as she shot with McVey, secretly snapping away. “The paparazzi [were there] every scene of every day while we were filming,” Bellamy says. “That was very strange, completely alien.” Yet it wasn’t completely unexpected either. The show’s shoots—especially those involving Emma Corrin and Elizabeth Debicki’s Princess Dianas—had been obsessively papped for the last few years.
But what Bellamy didn’t see coming? The students. When word got out that The Crown was filming on St. Andrews’s campus, Bellamy and McVey found themselves besieged by undergraduates with cameraphones who posted everything to social media. “When we went to St. Andrews, it was crazy,” Bellamy recalls. “I think because it’s a small university town, there were lots of TikToks while we were there. Just everyone knew. Then it was so weird being back home. I could go into Tesco and be not talked to.”
With The Crown’s final episodes dropping on December 14, however, those incognito Tesco trips will probably not last. In fact, maybe they’re already over: This summer Bellamy sat front row at Dior during Couture Week, and in early December she wore custom Valentino to The Crown’s London premiere. Now she’s in New York speaking to Vogue in a tailored black Fendi dress. Needless to say, it’s a far cry from a snake costume.
Earlier that day, Vogue’s social media director and I had asked Bellamy to film a TikTok for us near the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. The premise? Asking unsuspecting passersby to define British slang words—and then revealing that Bellamy was The Crown’s Kate Middleton. “You look like her!” was a common reply, but most people just uttered their awed congratulations. Not because they were starstruck necessarily—though some surely were—but because they knew what was going to happen to her. The Crown had launched other young actors—including Corrin, Claire Foy, and Matt Smith—into instant stardom. Logic had it that Bellamy would follow.
“Do you think you’re ready to be famous?” I ask her point-blank.
She thinks for a moment before answering. “I don’t really know what to be ready for.”
Below, see The Crown’s Meg Bellamy take Vogue through Kate Middleton’s Life in Looks.
Director: Nina Ljeti
Director of Photography: Riccardo Mejia
Editor: Nicole Cimei
Producers: Gigi Chavarria, Qieara Lesesne
Associate Director, Creative Development: Alexandra Gurvitch
Associate Producers: Marisah Yazbek, Lea Donenberg
Assistant Camera: Jon Corum
Gaffer: Cameron Sonsini
Audio: Gloria Marie
Production Assistants: Brock Spitaels, Becca Guzman
Production Coordinator: Ava Kashar
Production Manager: Natasha Soto-Albors
Line Producer: Romeeka Powell
Senior Director, Production Management: Jessica Schier
Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow
Postproduction Coordinator: Jovan James
Supervising Editor: Kameron Key
Postproduction Supervisor: Edward Taylor
Associate Talent Manager: Phoebe Feinberg
Associate Director, Video Talent :Meredith Judkins
Director of Content, Production: Rahel Gebreyes
Senior Director, Programming: Linda Gittleson
Executive Producer: Ruhiya Nuruddin
VP, Digital Video, English: Thespena Guatieri
Images and videos: The Crown/Netflix
Filmed at the Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills
