'You're too fat to play Kate': The Crown star Meg Bellamy reveals her torment by online trolls and 'men called Gary holding a fish' 

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Last December, Meg Bellamy went to Los Angeles for the first time. The 21-year-old actress was doing press for season six of The Crown, in which she starred as Kate Middleton. 

At home in the UK, Meg had been renting a flat in Berkshire; in Hollywood, she was staying in a swish hotel and attending the season premiere. 'I was in the pool in this incredible hotel, looking out to LA. It was like: 'What is my life?!'

When I meet Meg this May, it's in a rather less glamorous setting – a small studio in South London where she is rehearsing a play. There are no PRs or agents to meet me. The door to the studio is open so I wander in, wondering briefly if I have got lost until I see Meg sitting cross-legged on a sofa, wearing baggy trousers and a baggier T-shirt, drinking a cup of tea and chatting to two castmates. She looks, frankly, like most 21-year-olds.

She is starring in A Child of Science, a new play directed by Matthew Dunster – a former associate director of Shakespeare's Globe – at the Bristol Old Vic. It tells the true story of in vitro fertilisation, and the group of Manchester medics who created it in 1978. 

Dress, Vivetta.com. Jewellery, DavidMorris.com. Sandals, ReneCaovilla.com

Meg plays the study's leading nurse, Jean Purdy, opposite Tom Felton as physiologist Robert Edwards.

Felton, 36, is known for playing Draco Malfoy – the schoolboy villain in the Harry Potter films. He is, according to Meg, a 'really kind and talented man'. (At the end of our interview, we bump into Felton and the pair are genuinely friendly. He's in costume, wearing a waistcoat and trousers.  'Ahhh!' he says, putting on a warbling, actor-y voice and addressing Meg as her character, 'if it isn't Miss Jeaaaan Puuuuurdy!' 'Helloooo, Dr Edwaaards!' she replies.)

A Child of Science is Meg's first play since secondary school and her first job since The Crown; this paper gave the play four stars and praised 'a quick, clear-thinking, courageous Meg Bellamy'. Before she starred in the Netflix behemoth, she had never worked professionally.

The story is this: in July 2021, Meg left her state school in Berkshire – she was head girl and got an A* in her drama A-level – but had been rejected from various drama schools. So she rented a flat in the area and got a job as an actor at Legoland.

The gig required playing several Lego-related characters and interacting with punters around the theme park. Meg's main role was Red Brick, which involved dressing up as a giant red brick. For another part she played an evil snake in a Legoland production called Ninjago: The Portal of Peril.  This role involved dressing up as a giant snake. 

Meg, to be clear, recalls this with great enthusiasm. She met some of her closest friends working at Legoland and she still goes back to watch shows. It's thought that her rumoured boyfriend, an acrobat called Connor Dutton, worked at the park, too.

She didn't have an agent but was on the casting-call website Backstage, applying for jobs. 'I thought it would be amazing if I got into a paid short film. That was the crème de la crème,' she says.

Dress, Georgia Hardinge; Bracelets and ring, Piaget

In April 2023, she saw a casting call on Twitter, looking for a 'budding young actor' to play a teenage Middleton in The Crown. Meg sent a self-tape and the casting directors asked her to audition in person. In June, after several auditions – and having beaten thousands of other potential Kates – Meg was told she was in the final eight and was invited to a cast read-through at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire. 

That read-through 'was the best day of my life', she says. 'I thought: 'Even if I don't get this I'm just so glad I've had this experience.' She got a call from the casting associate Kate Bone four months later on an August day at 11.11am. There's a popular theory that 11.11am is a lucky time and people make a wish when the clock strikes it. 'I don't know if you believe that sort of thing,' says Meg, 'but it was crazy.'

The trouble was that, at 11.11am on that particular day in August, Meg was in her snake costume performing in Ninjago: The Portal of Peril. She felt her phone vibrate inside her pocket. When the performance ended, Meg saw it was a missed call from Bone and rushed to the quiet of the Legoland delivery van depot to ring her back. 'I sat on the kerb while these lorries were beeping around me and she told me I'd got the part.'

Meg was born in Leeds but moved to Berkshire with her parents and brother when she was six. Her mother works in pharmaceuticals and her father runs a business. The new family home was only ten minutes from the Middletons' house in Bucklebury. Meg was aware of the royals – 'as we all are growing up in Britain' – but doesn't recall much family discussion about Kate. This is understandable: when Kate and William met at St Andrews University in 2001, Meg hadn't been born.

To prepare for The Crown, she watched hours of Kate Middleton footage, studying her mannerisms and voice. 'I spent so much time 'with' her,' she says. 'You get this weird parasocial connection.' It made Meg reassess her previous royal ambivalence. 'She's so gracious and wonderful and self-assured. I will always be fond of Kate.'

Meg's research was so 'all-consuming' that after The Crown finished filming, she avoided reading stories about Kate. 'I've tried to put the character behind me. But of course,' she adds, referring to the Princess of Wales's cancer diagnosis, 'I so feel for  her and for the family.'

The Crown has won more Emmys than any other Netflix TV show (21 and counting) and by season five had a rumoured budget of £11 million per episode. Meg had daunting preconceptions for the six-month shoot.

'I expected it to be this big machine, and that I'd go into it – especially because it was the final season – and everyone would be, like: 'Don't mess it up! You've come into our very successful show. Do your part and do it well!' The reality was far more relaxed. 

The actors were given time to rehearse with each episode director, which is a rarity in TV, and Meg was amazed by the 'duty of care' shown by producers. They gave her contact details for Emma Corrin, the actor who played Diana in season four, in case she wanted advice. And Elizabeth Debicki, who played Diana in seasons five and six, asked the directors to share her phone number with Meg: 'She's been so supportive. I can call her about anything,' says Meg.

They filmed several scenes at Elstree, and Meg continued to rent and live in the flat in Berkshire. 'It was a double life,' she says. 'You realise how quiet the evenings can be when you've just been on set.'

Dress, Dior

Being on location in St Andrews was more exciting, if sometimes strange. 'The word got out on our first day that we were filming there,' says Meg. 'We'd be in the courtyard of the university and we'd look up and every window would be full of students filming us.

I remember being, like: 'My life is going to be like this.' And obviously I went back to Windsor and it's not like that! Which is great.'

Before the final season of The Crown was released last December, Meg did three months of press: she was on the front cover of newspapers; she went to New York with Vogue. Today there are several Meg Bellamy fan accounts on Instagram that have names like @AdoreMegBellamy and post daily pictures of the actress. 

Does her life now not feel a little like that day in St Andrews? Meg says she gets recognised sometimes. ('I get a lot of: 'Hi, Kate!') But in general, 'I don't consider myself famous – because of how I can still live my life.'

In September 2023, Meg was flown to Paris by Dior to watch a fashion show. This is a very 'famous person' thing to do, but her main memory is of watching a crowd of photographers stampeding to take pictures of actresses Anya Taylor-Joy, Jennifer Lawrence, Jenna Ortega and Rachel Zegler, who had arrived at the same time. 

Meg as Kate Middleton with Ed McVey as Prince William in season six of The Crown

'I feel so different [to them]. I'm sure they're all human beings but it was crazy watching the world react to them. There were people outside and you could hear their screams. That still doesn't feel like my world.' 

Would she ever want that sort of recognition? 'Gosh, no, I don't know if anyone wants that sort of crazy fame.'

 Professionally, however, things have changed. Since The Crown, Meg has a starry agent – the British duo Sarah Spear and Grace Clissold, whose clients include Robert Pattinson, Richard E Grant and Dev Patel. 'The auditions I get now would have been my wildest dreams.' 

Meg is tight-lipped about which projects she has auditioned for specifically, but her ideal would be to work with Steven Spielberg (she loves Jurassic Park) or Jodie Comer ('my favourite actor of all time').

Glitzy auditions come with rejections, which, given Meg's 'first big job was a yes, was a bit humbling'. She got cast in A Child of Science in early February, a little more than a month after finishing press for The Crown. 'I was glad because it gives you something to work towards and look forward to. Otherwise I worried I would have felt a bit lost.' 

When I ask her what's next, she says she doesn't know but the plan is to keep auditioning. 'It's crazy how quickly something can change. Like this play – I got offered it on the same day as the audition. You never know one week from the next. So genuinely I don't know what I'm doing next but I'm hoping I will in a few weeks.'

Meg and Tom Felton (AKA Draco Malfoy), her co-star in A Child of Science at Bristol Old Vic, appeared on The One Show last month

Meg seems cheery, but there are downsides to her newfound recognition. Take that aforementioned trip to Los Angeles. At the premiere, she wore a low-cut dress and thought little of it. 'I'd had this long day of press, it had gone well, then I went on my phone and there was all this negative stuff about my body online.' The comments were mostly: 'You're too fat to play Kate.'

'That was a glimpse into being a woman in this industry. I thought, 'OK, that's a sign to distance yourself, because it doesn't mean anything'.' She has since stopped reading online comments. 'You can't listen to that sort of stuff.' Not least because most of it is written by internet trolls, or, as Meg puts it, 'men called Gary who are holding a fish in their profile picture'. 

Besides, 'I've had so many amazing things happen to me,' she says. 'They're the losers for saying that. I'm living my best life over here!'

After The Crown 

Vanessa Kirby 36, Princess Margaret in seasons one and two

Starred in Mission: Impossible – Fallout opposite Tom Cruise, was nominated for a best actress Oscar for Pieces of a Woman and nabbed the part of Josephine in Ridley Scott's Napoleon.

Emerald Fennell 38, Camilla Parker Bowles in seasons three and four

Wrote six episodes of the BBC hit Killing Eve. Wrote and directed Promising Young Woman (becoming the first British woman to win a best original screenplay Oscar) and last year's cult hit Saltburn.

Erin Doherty 31, Princess Anne in seasons three and four

Landed the lead in the BBC/Amazon Prime drama Chloe, starred in a National Theatre production of The Crucible and has a main part in the new Disney+ show A Thousand Blows opposite Stephen Graham.

Josh O'Connor 34, Prince Charles in seasons three and four

Played Romeo in Romeo and Juliet alongside Jessie Buckley at The National Theatre, starred in tennis-romp Challengers, and has joined the cast for the latest in the murder-mystery film series Knives Out.

Emma Corrin 28, Princess Diana in season four 

Played the real-life scammer Anna Delvey in the West End show Anna X, got the lead role in the Netflix adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover and is starring in the next X-Men film.

 A Child of Science is at the Bristol Old Vic until 6 July. For tickets, go to bristololdvic.org.uk

 Picture director: Ester Malloy

Styling: Joanne M Kennedy

 Fashion assistant: Naledi Mbayiwa

Hair: Stefan Bertin using Living Proof and, Make-up: Lucy Burt, both at The Wall Group

 Netflix/Everett/REX, getty images