“The queen’s way of doing things, her stoic approach, not showing much emotion—that worked for the 70 years of her reign,” Carpenter noted. “And England, for many of those years, was a different place.”
Nowadays, however, people are used to perfect strangers spilling their guts online. And while no one is asking the royal family for a 24/7 live feed (well, perhaps someone has asked, but it isn’t widely demanded), the public likes it when the façade cracks.
“There’s something to be said about this infallible nature, this keeping calm and carrying on,” Carpenter noted. “There’s a lot of respect around that. But I think showing that they’re human, that they go through the same things that we go through—a lot of people have softened toward King Charles, but also to the royal family in general. They’re just like us—they just don’t talk about it in the same way that we might.”
And that goes for the side of the family that has made a historic practice of neither confirming nor denying and the side that writes books and makes Netflix documentaries.