Mike Nelson: “In The King, the English guy is played by a French guy and the French guy is played by an English guy.”
Arthur Boreman: “Most historically accurate part of the film…”
The Hundred Years’ War, 1415: England and France have been fighting for a century over who gets to rule what. Netflix makes a movie about it called The King. And in the casting department’s finest hour, they achieved the diplomatic solution that 100 years of warfare could not: they swapped the nationalities.
Timothée Chalamet — born in Manhattan, French on his mother’s side, fluent in French, basically half-French — plays Henry V, the English king who won Agincourt. Robert Pattinson — born in London, thoroughly English — plays the French Dauphin, the heir to the French throne. The two nations swapped princes like a medieval hostage exchange that nobody noticed.
It’s the kind of casting choice that sounds like a mistake and works perfectly on screen. Chalamet’s Henry is young, hungry, underestimated — exactly the historical Henry, who was 28 at Agincourt and came out of nowhere. Pattinson’s Dauphin is a preening, helmet-haired French prince who talks endless trash and then gets destroyed — and Pattinson, playing him with a French accent, delivers one of the funniest villain performances of the decade.
The funny thing is how perfectly it inverts the actual history. The real Henry V was ruthless and brilliant; the real Dauphin was famously incompetent. France and England spent a century trying to destroy each other, and then in 2019, Netflix just… mixed them. Henry played by a Frenchman. Dauphin played by an Englishman. It’s the Hundred Years’ War if both sides had agreed to swap quarterbacks before the game.
Arthur Boreman’s reply is the perfect closer: “Most historically accurate part of the film.” Because of course — in a movie full of creative liberties, the ONE thing that’s accurate is the casting irony. The French king being played by an Englishman and the English king by a Frenchman is somehow the most authentic thing about the whole production.
Agincourt was won by the English longbowmen. The movie was won by the Franco-American pretending to be English and the Englishman pretending to be French. Shakespeare wrote Henry V as the greatest English hero; Netflix cast a Frenchman and it still worked. 600 years of history, one casting table, zero fucks given.
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