Meg Bellamy has a selfie that she won’t show me. As we sit and chat over sparking 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 6 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.”
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