King Charles The Boy Who Walked Alone is a new documentary on Paramount+ which attempts to refresh the image of the new King of England, Charles III. Forget what you’ve seen in The Crown of on other shows about the royal family, this film wants you to know that the real Charles has been misunderstood his whole life and isn’t the man you think he is. While that is probably very true in many ways, this documentary is not afraid to point fingers at Princess Diana, Prince Harry, and Meghan Markle for helping to destroy not just Charles’s reputation, but the monarchy as a whole.
Opening Shot: A woman makes herself comfortable on a couch and introduced herself: “So I’m India Hicks and I happen to be Prince Charles’s goddaughter,” she states. After Hicks’ introduction, several other people, all of whom who have had intimate access to the new King of England, introduce themselves, these are the people whose firsthand knowledge and access to the King will help us understand who he is throughout this new documentary, they include his personal chef, his pilot, previous girlfriends, and friends from school. (And for the record, Hicks, who is a designer, model, and was even a bridesmaid in Charles and Diana’s wedding, is the most high-profile person in the film and is in it the least.)
The Gist: There’s no shortage of documentaries (and, of course, The Crown which is a fictional but based on certain truths) about the royal family, which all help paint a picture of who these people, this family chosen by God, really are. Every time something significant happens within the family – be it a death, a wedding, or the anniversary of a death or wedding – an onslaught of shows and movies, usually featuring interviews with people who have been closely associated with the royals, are released to cash in on that sweet search value. King Charles: The Boy Who Walked Alone, which comes out the week of Charles’ coronation, provides access to the man who has waited decades to assume the role as the head of the monarchy. In this new documentary, Charles is the sole focus – this isn’t Diana’s story, this is his and his alone for once. Using little-seen footage of Charles as a bachelor in old newsreels from the mid-’70s, we’re shown a funny and charming side to the Prince; he had yet to be drowned in a sea of tabloid drama about his marriage and affairs. His love life was always fodder for gossip, but in the footage here, he seems more carefree than we’ve ever seen him, like someone who actually has had a bit of fun in his life. Interviews with some of the women who dated him in that era corroborate the fact that he was not always stodgy and affection-withholding, that he was actually a charming guy.
Previous documentaries have covered the ways that the Queen was never warm with her children, and how Prince Philip viewed Charles as too sensitive and weak to fulfill the role of King, and this one adds more color to those anecdotes as well. One former classmate of Charles’s from Gordonstoun School, a man named Johnny Stonborough, talks about how Charles was a target of bullies (and how faculty sanctioned such bullying), and how no one wanted to be associated with him, lest they be social pariahs themselves, hence his nickname and the title of the film, “the boy who walked alone.”
Where this documentary truly veers from many others is the way it treats Diana, who married Charles despite the fact that his true love, Parker-Bowles, was deemed unsuitable to become the future Queen because she was older (a.k.a. not a virgin) and married at the time. Several of the film’s interview subjects, including royal biographer Penny Junor and Royal Protection Officer Allan Peters paint a wholly unflattering picture of Diana’s personality, and Peters even claims unequivocally that Diana, and not Charles, was the first one to step out on the marriage (with another of the family’s Protection Officers, a man named Barry Mannakee, who was fired from his position in 1986).
These revelations, that Diana’s sour, “dark” demeanor and penchant for other men, were key factors in the demise of the marriage, isn’t all that different from most other media narratives, but it feels pointed and even bitter at times. I’m not an insider, but as someone who has done a fair amount of research on the royals I’ve typically been sympathetic to Diana given what we know about Charles and Camilla’s affair and its timeline. But Peters declares all of what we’ve been told about that a lie, and his distaste for Diana is unequivocal (he also says here that she assaulted him with a shoe when he sacked Mannakee, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1987). At other times, Diana’s post-partum depression and bulimia are described as “hysteria” and that Charles was ill-equipped to handle so much “raw emotion,” which also feels like a somewhat contemptuous way to describe a person struggling with mental health.
Later in the film, Charles is painted as a father who cherished Harry and Meghan’s relationship and was thrilled at their marriage, and Meghan is unequivocally named as the reason for any rifts in the family. The end of the film doesn’t even conclude with any mention of Charles’s coronation, instead it simply lays any blame for the monarchy’s low approval ratings at Harry’s feet, as Harry took a cue from his mother when he chose to air all of his dirty laundry in his autobiography. And then it just ends on that note! The new King would live happily ever after, if only his ungrateful son would let him, the end.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Of all the many royal shows and documentaries available, I’d say that King Charles: The Boy Who Walked Alone is like a rebuttal to Diana: In Her Own Words, which acts as the “she said” to King Charles‘s “he said.” HBO’s The Princess, which tells the story of Diana’s life purely through newsreel footage (both positive and negative toward the Princess) also reveals much of the same information that’s laid out here, though through the lends of the media coverage around the couple.
Our Take? The first third of King Charles: The Boy Who Walked Alone helps us to understand Charles as a young man, a boyfriend, a son. Raised by stoic and unaffectionate parents, he was forced to endure his position in a dysfunctional institution, and that, in turn, had grievous affects on his ability to have a healthy relationship with peers in school, or with the woman he chose as his wife. But we already kind of knew that.
The film adds to the narrative of what we’ve already heard by speaking to all these people who know or knew Charles, and allowing us inside his world. Humanizing Charles and making him seem like a funny but misunderstood man and a victim of Diana’s vengeful media frenzy seems to be the attempt here, but I can’t help but feel that the documentary has the unintended, opposite effect. Though it’s meant to offer Charles’s side of things by those who knew him when, it fails to focus on the fact that everyone here is a victim, a victim of a flawed, outdated system. The monarchy as it exists now (and in the 20th century, when this tale began) only sets up those who exist within it to fail. That’s the folly of the monarchy, not Charles’s personality or Diana’s volatility, and it’s disappointing that the new perspective featured in this film drags her reputation in an effort to make Charles out to be the good guy or the one true victim.
The film has attempts at fairness, there are interviews with those who knew Diana who defend her and describe the duress she was under for most of her marriage, but it is less sympathetic to Harry, who is trashed and made out to be the reason that the monarchy may not survive into the next century. That damn kid said too much in his book, and now the entire institution is balanced on a razor’s edge! It’s all his fault!
The film wants us to come away thinking that Charles has secretly been suffering the most as a result of all these disappointingly public people in his life, and he’s noble for remaining so stoic in his suffering. Instead, it only makes it obvious that this is a film by and for royalists who are afraid of what will happen when things change with the times.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: The camera circles around a crown as one of the film’s talking heads, Grant Harrold, a former royal butler, says, “I don’t think Harry realizes that maybe he started a time bomb which could actually be the catalyst to actually destroy the monarchy… The monarchy is everything, obviously. And [Charles] wants to ensure that it’s protected like his mother did. So if he feels that his son is going to damage or affect it, he’ll have to make the decision, do I support my son or do I support the monarchy? He will support the monarchy.”
Sleeper Star: As Charles’ former Royal Protection Officer, Allan Peters (who starts his interview by saying that now that he’s old and nearing death, he can finally speak out to correct all the falsehoods that the media has spewed about Charles), has nothing nice to say about Diana. Peters makes some shocking statements and accusations toward her while also praising Charles for his stoicism and public silence on certain issues. I find much of what he says manipulative as it’s so one-sided, but he certainly adds a new dimension – a staunch, loyal-to-the-royals dimension – to the film.
Most Pilot-y Line: “People thought he was this dry, old stick. The funny thing is, he’s one of the most emotional people I’ve ever met.”
Our Call: SKIP IT. While I truly do believe that there’s more than one side to every story and there are hundreds of aspects of King Charles we will never know or understand, this attempt to pull back the curtain on him is a misfire. On the one hand, the film wants us to know that he is committed to the crown and his God-appointed duties. On the other, the film just wants to humanize him. Isn’t the point of the monarchy that you can’t do both?
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.