Why The Crown Cut Its Princess Margaret Sex Scene

Princess Margaret has proven to be the M.V.P. of The Crown, consistently providing the show’s drama, glamour, and snark through a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. The second season shows Margaret, played by Vanessa Kirby,mending her broken heart with a bad boy by Buckingham Palace standards, Antony Armstrong-Jones (played by Matthew Goode). One particularly steamy sequence features the princess meeting the photographer at his private studio for a portrait session/seduction. And in a new interview, Kirby reveals that The Crown creator Peter Morgan initially scripted a love scene for the duo.

“There was originally a sex scene between Margaret and Antony that was supposed to be really important for her to finally meet her man, come together with him,” Kirby recently told reporters. “It wasn’t raunchy at all in the end, it was respectful.”

Alas, The Crown’s powers-that-be decided that it might be uncouth to show royals between the bedsheets.

“We had a big debate on whether to show royal boob or not,” Kirby revealed. “We decided they don’t want to see royal boob, thank God.”

While Kirby was spared from love scenes, her co-star Matthew Goode was not—and featured in perhaps the most scandalous sequence of The Crown’s two seasons. Given the reputation of Armstrong-Jones, later known as Lord Snowdon, though, love scenes were very on brand for the real-life character. “The twin motors that drove him throughout his life, were work and sex,” wrote biographer Anne de Courcy in her book Snowdon, which details the photographer’s many affairs, one of which resulted in a love child who was born while Snowdon was on honeymoon with Princess Margaret.

Clive Irving, who worked with Armstrong-Jones at the Daily Express in London in the 1950s, wrote:

As it soon turned out, Tony and Margaret represented modernity with their libidos more than with any progressive intellectual ideas. Tony introduced Margaret to a bohemia that she naturally embraced—writers, actors, artists, and even journalists. It was a very sexy set that included, whether Margaret realized it or not, a number of bisexual men who had been Tony’s lovers. The royal couple were openly hungry for each other. One friend, asked what they had in common, replied “sex, sex, sex. They can’t keep their hands off each other, even with other people present.”

Irving claims that, like on The Crown, Armstrong-Jones had a flat that doubled as a photography studio—convenient for someone so prolific, but less so, on occasion, for his assistants.

[H]is darkroom assistant, a very posh and chaste young woman, developed a roll of film she wasn’t supposed to see that featured one of Tony’s more exotic girlfriends trying out a number of pornographic poses at his direction.

Even his obituary in The Telegraph characterized Snowdon as a hyper-sexual individual, with the oft-repeated line, “If it moves, he’ll have it.” It seems fitting, then, that at least Snowdon be remembered on The Crown with a love-scene tribute.

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Julie MillerJulie Miller is a Senior Hollywood writer for Vanity Fair’s website.

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