Charles Dance: Lord Mountbatten would be in despair about the Sussexit
I was today years old when I realized that Charles Dance was never once nominated for an Emmy for playing Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones. HOW? How did I miss that? Granted, Peter Dinklage usually had the acting nominations locked up on that show, but Dance did outstanding work on GoT. Well, this year, he got an Emmy acting nomination for his work on The Crown. Dance played Lord Mountbatten in Seasons 3 and 4, and obviously, Mountbatten’s assassination is featured heavily in the start of the fourth season. He spoke to Page Six about what an Emmy nomination means to him at this stage of his career, and he pontificates a bit about what Lord Mountbatten would have thought about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex exiting the royal family.
What Lord Louis Mountbatten would think of the Sussexit: “I think he would be in despair about it. Because you know, Mountbatten was a traditionalist, he was very proud of the monarchy, very proud of his royal line. And he was of that generation that accepted that there was a way to behave. ‘This is the way to behave.’ He was almost the last of his kind, really.”
His Emmy nomination: “It’s nice to be looked over, better than being overlooked. I’ve been doing this job for about 45 years now. And you know, it’s just nice to be recognized for doing a job well, which I hope is the case. But other than that, I don’t think any of us should let any of these awards go to our heads. Does that make any sense?”
On the criticism that Peter Morgan plays fast & loose with history: “What [screenwriter] Peter Morgan has done is to write it in his own inimitable way. He’s documenting the life of a woman in an institution that is rapidly changing in an empire; that from the time she took the throne was in decline. And a lot of that is very well-documented. Peter, with the research that he has and from that the opinions he feels able to have, can write what are essentially fictional scenes within the kind of documentary nature of the series. But you know, nobody set out to make a documentary.”
It’s more fun to play a villain: “You tend to get much better lines. Unless the good guy is funny as well. You can be good and funny and that’s great — but most of the time, really good well-written villains tend to make you laugh through their audacity. They are able to say things and do things that a lot of people, perhaps secretly in their darker moments, wish they could say and do.”
I don’t think Charles Dance is trying to shade the Sussexes or trash them or anything. He was clearly asked what his “character” or the real Mountbatten would have thought about all of this. And he was probably right, although it’s one of those “what would Diana think about Sussexit” questions, where if those people were still alive, everything would be so different across the board. While I think Mountbatten would have absolutely encouraged Charles and Diana to wed, he would have strong feelings about their marriage turmoil and he would have gotten involved too. And on and on. But yes, I would be curious what Mountbatten-in-his-prime would have thought, and what a Prince Philip-in-his-prime would have thought.
Photos courtesy of Netflix.
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