‘The Crown’ Is Recreating The Tampongate Sexting Phone Call Between King Charles And Camilla

Season 5 of The Crown will recreate the infamous tampongate scandal between Prince Charles and Camilla, so you can’t tell me this series isn’t historically accurate.

For those unfamiliar, prior to becoming King, Prince Charles made headlines after a six-minute phone call between himself and Camilla Parker-Bowles — both married to other people at the time — was leaked to the press. But the story didn’t make the front page purely because of a little infidelity among royals, no. It made headlines because Charles — now head of state — told Camilla that he would like to “live inside” her and be reincarnated as a tampon.

As we learned the hard way after being forced to read Adam Levine’s leaked sexts, nothing is more cringe-inducing than having your deeply horny messages made public. I don’t care how suave you think you are, when your sexts are blasted on the front page of The Daily Mail, you will 100 percent regret being born. It’s just not sexy.

But in addition to having the transcript printed in the pages of the tabloids back in 1993, King Charles will now have to relive the embarrassment when he turns on Netflix — something that I am sure he already does.

Initially, Josh O’Connor — who played Charles in Seasons 3 and 4 — refused to reenact the scene, asserting that he wasn’t about to have his first serious acting credit be ruined with a tampon monologue.

“When they offered me the role, one of my first questions was — I say questions, I think it was pretty much a statement — ‘We are not doing the tampon phone call,’” he previously said. “[The Crown] was my one chance for my parents to see something [I’ve acted in] with no shame and there’s no way I was going to scuttle that by talking about tampons on Netflix.”

However, his successor Dominic West has confirmed that he will be practicing his best Tampax impression.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he noted that in hindsight, he thinks Charles and Camilla are the real victims here.

“Looking back on it, and having to play it, what you’re conscious of is that the blame was not with these two people, two lovers, who were having a private conversation. What’s really [clear now] is how invasive and disgusting was the press’s attention to it, that they printed it out verbatim and you could call a number and listen to the actual tape,” he told Entertainment Weekly.

“I think it made me extremely sympathetic towards the two of them and what they’d gone through.”

While I respect his right to an opinion, I would argue that I — the person who had to read about Charles’ desire to be a tampon — am the victim.