This story is taken from the spring 2024 issue of Dazed. Pre-order a copy of the magazine here.
This was not in the script. “I can’t stress how different the route I was taking was going to be,” confides a bashful and “rusty” Luther Ford, the 23-year-old acting novice who found his way on to television’s grandest stage. “I was studying film production. I was going to leave college and become an assistant, or a runner, at some little studio in Soho.” If Ford had followed that path with the keenness he had envisaged 18 months ago, we would likely never have heard from him: he’d be behind the camera, toying with the aperture, standing back from the spotlight.
Today, the camera points towards Ford. Like a bolt from the blue, he was snatched from civilian life through an open casting call, and thrust to global prominence in the final series of Peter Morgan’s staggeringly successful royal drama, The Crown. “Everything was kind of happening quite instinctually,” says Ford. “I auditioned, then got the part three weeks later, which I now realise is ridiculous.”
And not just any part. Luther Ford – film student, untrained actor, normal kid – would be asked, sight-unseen and with one month’s preparation, to become the most turbulent, complicated royal of his age, Henry Mountbatten-Windsor, the present Duke of Sussex (who prefers it if you “just call him ‘Harry’”). In accepting that challenge, Ford surrendered himself to the attention of the world, electing to play the most talked-about figure in the most talked-about show. Was that sensible? “It’s quite hard to assess,” he says, “because I was so new to it – I’m still so new to it – and so naive.”
Then, after the chaos of filming came the chaos of publicity: red carpets, flashbulbs and photoshoots; limousines, journalists and security guards. “I’d never even been to America before,” he beams, still bewildered by the experience. “That was a mad month, a lot of adrenaline.” Within weeks of his first appearance being broadcast, Ford was profiled on the pages of Vanity Fair and The New York Times, his modish, angular features fitting in neatly alongside those of his celebrated castmates. That’s what you call breaking out, passing the eye test, having the ‘it’ factor – star power.
When I meet with Ford at the start of the year, he’s already most of the way down that new, strange path that The Crown presented to him: he has just signed with the United Talent Agency, and is reckoning with the possibilities now laid before him. “My life has changed,” he says succinctly. It’s a life he is still learning to live, now the novelty of his debutant status has worn off. “I remember one interviewer asking, ‘So, what’s your process?’ and I’d say that I didn’t have one, this was the process.” Breaking out is one thing, but staying there is another. You only have one chance at a first impression and, for better or for worse, Ford has made his on the largest scale imaginable. Lack of experience aside, Ford came to The Crown with a lifetime’s love of cinema, albeit one that began in unusual fashion. “My mum wouldn’t let me watch any TV or films when I was very young,” he recalls, “so I started filming things on a little camcorder, just to watch them back again.” It was, as the actor admits, “a fixation... making things because I was being denied them”. Thankfully, Ford had a co-star for his earliest shoots. “We must’ve been about seven, me and my best friend. We’d record these long, coordinated fight scenes all over the house and the street – we’d just set the camera down and start brawling.”
A little bit later, in their early teens, Ford and his friend would graduate from fight scenes into painstakingly composed mini-movies. “We’d shoot a scene per weekend, every weekend, and it would take like a year to finish the film,” the actor recalls. Once it was completed, the pair moved straight on to the next project. “Maybe we’d show it once, to our parents, but nothing after that.” Ford now regrets, to an extent, having shied away from putting those films up on YouTube. “We should’ve capitalised, we were the perfect age.” But the everyday realities of life at an all-boys’ school gave Ford and his friend too much pause for thought when it came to showcasing their talents. “We thought that if we ever released the films we were making, we’d have been destroyed... and we would have been! We were quite strange teenagers.”
Ford found himself enamoured with the medium of filmmaking – it is, as he puts it, “just such fun” to make a movie of your own, building your crew, collaborating and the rest of it. But it wasn’t until film school that Ford really started paying attention to the finer details of movies, how others crafted their creations, and how captivating a performance could be. “Jack Nicholson,” he begins, “there’s something in his eyes. It’s there in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, it’s there in Easy Rider, The Shining – there’s light in his eyes. Even when he’s just buying coffee or standing around, he’s so magnetic.” Also catching Ford’s eye for the first time around this period was the young Prince Harry, taken in passively but routinely, how everyone in Britain experiences the royals. “My earliest image of Harry is of him in his early 20s, walking in some sort of field in a shirt.” Ford fleshes out the image, eyes cast upward as if conjuring the memory out of some far recess of his brain. “He’s smiling, this cheeky smile – he has an openness about him, the way he’s moving and communicating.” This impression, vague but visceral, was the sum-total of what Ford knew about Prince Harry until October 2022.
The story of Ford’s ascent to The Crown is perhaps best summarised by a screenshot he posted on Instagram at the very end of his annus mirabilis, 2023. In the screengrabbed WhatsApp thread, Ford’s brother’s girlfriend excitedly shares a callout notice from the British Youth Music Theatre Facebook page, attached with two snapshots of the young Prince. “Luther this could be your moment,” she writes. “Hahahaha my time has come,” Ford responds, before adding, “I don’t know if the resemblance is strong enough.” “Doesn’t hurt to try,” comes the reply. Needless to say, Ford attended the audition, and you know the rest.
At first, Ford notes, it was hard to believe precisely why he was being flung into such an enormous role with so little in the way of practice or preparation. “But I was aware that, OK, there must be some sort of potential that the directors took on.” And so, instead of just developing a decent Prince Harry impression, he would engage and relate with the character of the boy Prince, as formulated by Peter Morgan. That character is, as Ford describes, “the black sheep” – a kid caught in all manner of dualities. “There’s a lightness, but there’s pain. There’s love for his brother, and intense jealousy.”
Feeling like an outsider was no great challenge to Ford – he was an outsider, on this set of superstars, having to learn “the basics of acting. When to breathe, when to pause for a comma, how to emphasise sad words.” All around him, though, was a network of Hollywood professionals who were absolutely dedicated to getting him up to standard: three dialect coaches, research assistants, multiple directors, his patient and obliging co-stars. “The cast knew when to leave me to it, and it was great. By not speaking to me like I knew nothing,” – which, as Ford insists, was very much the case – “it felt like I’d been accepted.”
At the end of episode seven, “Alma Mater”, things really come together. You can see it on screen, in the crackle behind his eyes, and Ford highlights it too: the young Prince, nipping out for a smoke on Christmas Day, unloads the breadth of his difficulties with his brother William, home at Sandringham after his first term at university. “Doing that, I overcame quite a lot, because it seemed such a daunting prospect: this long, delicate monologue, and I was like, ‘Me?’” The pain is there in Harry’s speech, but so is the inimitable cheekiness – the cheekiness Ford spotted in Harry years before, the smile he tapped into whenever he needed to break into the character. “It’s hard to undercut everything you say and do it with humour, with cheekiness, but when I smile I really feel it. It helps that I’m a big smiler anyway.” As that scene wrapped, and Ford received the warm congratulations of the cast and crew around him, he felt more like Prince Harry than ever before.
Now the series is done, Ford doesn’t feel like Harry any more. Nor does he, after “a year of concentrated thinking” about the royal spare, feel too attached to him. “I don’t think about it any more,” he says. “I’ve left him, I’ve left The Crown, I’ve left it all in 2023.” Letting go was something of a task – Ford compares it to “leaving school” – and now all is said and done on the project, he marvels at “spending so long invested” in Harry’s life, only now to be travelling on. “I think in order to move on from it and be ready for what’s next, I had to let him go, which felt quite good, you know? But I’m fond of him.”
And so, with Ford leaving his breakout role behind, talk turns to the future, one he’s cagey but decidedly positive about. “I’ve got a couple of things lined up,” he says, before gesturing that he can’t be too explicit about those plans. “But I’ll be working with people I really respect... and I may be brandishing a sword.” For now, though, Ford already has one eye on summer, and a long-awaited trip to Greece with his friends, a tonic to toast the madness of the last two years.
He counts his luck. “I’ve gained a lot of confidence from doing something I didn’t think I could do. It’s rare to be put in a position where you have to commit to something like that, most people don’t get to do it. And it’s exciting... if you come out the other side.” We know the Luther Ford who made it this far, the film student with the winning smile and the golden ticket. Who is he now? “God, who am I?” he asks in response. “Well, it turns out I’m an actor.”
Photography Rachel Fleminger Hudson, styling Andra-Amelia Buhai, hair Kim Rance at LGA Management using Authentic Beauty Concept, make-up Rebecca Davenport at LGA Management using Make Up For Ever, set design Camilla Byles, photographic assistants Joe Petini, Sinclair Jaspard Mandy, styling assistants Arielle Neuhaus Gold, Jenson Kay-Polley, Nina Gahrén Williamson, hair assistants Anoushka Danielle, El-Frida Ibrahim-Dikko, Reve Ryu, make-up assistants India Haffner, Victoria Todd, set design assistants Eddie Amos, Joe Winter, Penny Oliver, production Grace Conway at Pundersons Gardens, casting Mischa Notcutt at 11casting