“One of the biggest casting challenges of the show presented itself when it came time to find the actor who would play Nick, Commander Waterford’s driver, June’s engmatic lover, and a potential Eye of Gilead.
Despite the showrunner’s plans for the character, his presence in the pilot episode was limited to only a few lines.
Thomas recalls "For anybody who had that question, we said, "Look, we haven’t felt like this since the infamous Breaking Bad. This is something special. This will be something great. You need to trust us.”
And that led to actors getting on the phone with Bruce and talking it through, because they were making a commitment based on maybe one or two lines in the script…and Max Minghella saw through all of that and came in and read, in a climate where he doesn’t have to come in and read if he doesn’t want to.“
It was a commitment that was easy to make for Minghella. "The truth is that before I even read the pilot script, it was sent to me with real support from people I worked with who…really believed it was something I should be part of. And then when I read it… it was genuinely just in a different league to anything I’d read in quite some time.”
“For me, the most interesting thing about playing Nick is the element of spy on spy on spy,” he says. ’“That ambiguity in the book is compelling, and then even more so in the TV show, where we have to live with these characters for a very long time. I don’t want to give all my cards away that quickly, so I thought it was a less-is-more situation.
"Nick in the book is very much a cipher,” explains Kira Snyder, co-executive producer and writer of the episode where we learn more about Nick’s history. “Nick is part of the political structure, he’s part of the power apparatus…but how did he get there? Part of the fun of that episode was to kind of peel back the mystery of this young man and see where he came from, how he got recruited, and how his idealism was turned against him, how it was curdled by the corrupt system of Gilead. How he keeps trying to find something to believe in, some way to make things work, make things good. Which is what we see with his becoming an Eye; he doesn’t have alot of ways to strike back at the Commander, but through his role as part of the secret police informer network he has the ability to try to keep a check on the man.”
This season of The Crown is utterly hilarious because every episode Charles is going on and on about how his mother should step down and just let him be king already only for him to have to wait decades to ascend to the throne
Serves him right
Which makes one wonder should he step down and let William be king??
