Royal fans are itching for the next season of “The Crown,” but there’s one storyline the show reportedly won’t cover ― period.
Actor Josh O’Connor, who portrays Prince Charles on the hit Netflix series, said that royal watchers won’t get to see the infamous “Tampongate” exchange play out between the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker-Bowles before she became his second wife. Apparently, talking about a tampon is just too much to bear.
“When they offered me the role, one of my first questions was ― I say questions, I think it was pretty much a statement ― ‘We are not doing the tampon phone call,’ O’Connor said on SiriusXM’s “EW Live” with Jessica Shaw on Monday.
“Pre ‘The Crown,’ I had made many independent films, many television shows where there was a lot of nudity and a lot of slightly dodgy characters and this was my one chance for my parents to see something with no shame,” he said.
“There’s no way I was going to scuff on that by talking about tampons on Netflix,” O’Connor added. “So that was like out. Unfortunately, all the fans of ‘Tampongate’ will be very disappointed.”
“Tampongate,” sometimes misogynistically called “Camillagate,” refers to a secretly recorded conversation between Charles and Camilla in 1989, in which the Prince of Wales joked that he’d like to be Camilla’s tampon. The prince was still married to Princess Diana at the time, but the full conversation was leaked in January 1993, a few months after Diana and Charles had separated.
Below is a transcript of the exchange, as provided by the Mirror:
CAMILLA: Mmm, so do I. I need you all the week. All the time.
CHARLES: Oh, God. I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!
CAMILLA (laughing): What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers? (Both laugh). Oh, you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.
CHARLES: Or, God forbid, a Tampax. Just my luck! (Laughs)
CAMILLA: You are a complete idiot! (Laughs) Oh, what a wonderful idea.
CHARLES: My luck to be chucked down a lavatory and go on and on forever swirling round on the top, never going down.
CAMILLA (laughing): Oh darling!
CHARLES: Until the next one comes through.
CAMILLA: Oh, perhaps you could just come back as a box.
CHARLES: What sort of box?
CAMILLA: A box of Tampax, so you could just keep going.
CHARLES: That’s true.
CAMILLA: Repeating yourself … (laughing). Oh, darling, oh I just want you now.
While it seems unlikely that the show would skip over the exchange, author, biographer and historian Hugo Vickers, who writes the popular “The Crown: Dissected” series, had one theory for HuffPost.
“The makers of ‘The Crown’ will be guided by how they think their massive audiences will receive each episode and they no doubt feel that ‘Tampongate’ might reduce their viewing numbers,” he said by email on Tuesday.
Though if the series is going to skip over that particular moment, Vickers, who points out all the historical inaccuracies of the show in his books, has some thoughts on what else the show shouldn’t cover.
“I personally wish they would leave the Royal Family alone altogether ― since they continually twist facts to the disadvantage of these living people,” he said.
Netflix didn’t respond to a request for comment.
While “Tampongate” might be off the table, O’Connor said in an interview with The New Yorker last December that some people are even bothered at the thought of him doing a sex scene as Charles.
“Ultimately, I get it,” O’Connor said. “He’s, like, the father of a nation. I don’t want to see anything with Prince Charles having sex.”