No, Netflix doesn't talk to its friend Prince Harry about The Crown

As a “fictional dramatization” of real-life events—a label that its home streamer hastily appended to the series the last time people got mad at it for its handling of the lives of the British royal family—Netflix’s The Crown has always been in a weird relationship with reality. That’s only gotten stranger, obviously, as the series’ timeline has caught up with the real world, to the point that it now features, in its bifurcated final season, characters who are actual living human beings who—to pick an example at random—have active development deals with The Crown’s owners over at Netflix right now.

We speak, of course, of Prince Harry, Duke Of Sussex, successor-in-law to-some-presumably-very-small-percentage-of-the-profits-from-Suits. Harry and wife Meghan Markle have had a development deal with Netflix since 2020—i.e., just around the time Crown creator Peter Morgan started featuring his parents, Charles and Diana, in the series, and well before he himself started appearing on it, as well. (Portrayed by Teddy Hawley, Will Powell, and then Luther Ford as the show has jumped forward in time.) But while Harry has expressed his own basic approval of the series in the past (saying it gives a “rough idea” of the pressures of royal life), it turns out that neither Netflix, nor Morgan himself, have ever talked with him about its big fancy TV show about his grandma.

“We keep a wall around this topic when we talk,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in a new Variety profile of Morgan this week. “For obvious reasons.” (I.e., “We have won several Emmys and built ourselves a reputation for prestige television by making a TV show about your grandma.”) The series creator also made it clear that he tries to keep any conversations about the show with his co-worker Harry completely non-existent. When asked whether there’s any truth to the idea that Harry “fact-checks” the series, Morgan quickly shoots it down: “I haven’t heard it from his lips. And I’ve never had the conversation with him about it.” On that same note, Morgan makes it clear that he hasn’t read Harry’s 2023 memoir Spare, noting that it’s “Not that I wouldn’t be interested. But I didn’t want his voice to inhabit my thinking too much. I’ve got a lot of sympathy with him, a lot of sympathy. But I didn’t want to read his book.”

Elsewhere in the profile, Morgan expresses his belief that whatever market forces allowed the massively expensive The Crown to exist in the first place are pretty much spent—“I think we should cherish the memory of them, because this is a rare and dying thing,” he ruefully notes—before confessing that, yeah, he does in fact have an idea for a prequel series kicking around in his head.