Dominic West on recreating Prince Charles’s ‘bizarre’ breakdancing video in The Crown: ‘It’s completely arrhythmic’

‘The trouble I found was you get too much into the rhythm, which was a fatal mistake,’ actor joked

Dominic West has explained how he came to recreate King Charles’s “bizarre” breakdancing moment for The Crown.

The British actor plays the monarch, then Prince Charles, in the fifth season of Netflix’s historical drama.

Episode five of the series centres around the work of his charity The Prince’s Trust and ends with a surprise credits sequence in which Charles awkwardly breakdances at an event.

Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Monday (28 November), West explained that the scene was inspired by a real-life video he’d during his “research” for the role.

The Wire star said that he was later showed the footage by his co-star Olivia Williams, who plays Camilla Parker-Bowles.

“On YouTube, there is footage of Prince Charles dancing as part of a Prince’s Trust thing,” West explained. “He’s at a youth centre and he’s meeting lots of the kids he helps with The Prince’s Trust and they started breakdancing and they pulled him in to dance with them.”

Adding that the royal was often “proud” of his dancing skill, West continued: “He takes his dancing quite seriously and [with] this thing, he gets into it. He’s dancing with these two kids.”

The clip was then shown of the original dance, with West laughing as Kimmel described it as “easily one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen in my life”.

“I feel like if this had happened after the advent of YouTube, that would be the most popular video in the history of the world,” the late-night host said.

West responded: “It’s so bizarre, because it’s late Seventies disco mixed in with doing this quite stiff [dance]. He takes it very seriously and you’ve got to admire that.”

He then explained that it took “quite a while” to learn to breakdance in Charles’s style.

“[The choreographer] said, ‘The difficulty is, there’s no rhythm. It’s completely arrhythmic. The trouble I found was you get too much into the rhythm, which was a fatal mistake… It’s much harder to dance out of time. He does it brilliantly.”

West went on to perform a Charles-style breakdance for Kimmel and the cheering crowd.

The Crown is on Netflix now.