Fictionalising monarchs and royalty comes with its own set of challenges, notably the task of making stories about the ultra-privileged feel relevant and emotionally resonant to modern audiences. This guide looks at some ways to approach writing about royals with empathy and relatability…

Dramatizing royalty: an overview

Monarchies offer writers high stakes, concentrated power, rich visual worlds, and characters whose public and private lives are in perpetual, dramatic conflict. Kings, queens and those in line to the throne cannot simply walk away. The fact they’re trapped by virtue of their lineage is the engine of great drama.

But there’s an obvious tension. Royal families are, by definition, elites. People born into extraordinary wealth, privilege, and power. For a modern audience, particularly one that is politically and socially diverse, this can create a distance that’s hard to bridge. After all, why should we care about the internal agonies of the ruling class?

The answer is that the most effective royal dramas aren’t really about power. They’re about the human cost of power.

Finding the human story inside the institution

The most consistent technique in successful royal drama is the use of the institution as an antagonist. It’s not enough to have conflict between characters. The system, with all its protocols, expectations, and historical weight, becomes a force that bears down on those living within its confines.

This works across very different historical periods and national contexts. In Spanish series Isabel (2012-2014), the future Queen of Castile must navigate political intrigue and the rigid constraints placed on women in 15th century Iberian court life. The drama comes from watching Isabel find ways to exercise her intelligence and ambition within (and around) a system that was not designed for her.

Similarly, French miniseries Versailles (2015-2018) uses Louis XIV’s court as a pressure cooker in which the ‘Sun King’ must assert authority while managing the egos, conspiracies, and personal loyalties of those around him.

The key question to ask of any royal subject is: what does this person want that the institution won’t allow them to have?

The gap between personal desire and institutional duty is where the drama lives.

Approaches to writing monarchs & royalty

There are many ways to dramatize royalty, from Pablo Larraín’ impressionistic, psychologically-focused portrait of Princess Diana, Spencer (2021) to the anarchic dark comedy The Great (2020-). Let’s explore some more examples that highlights the different approaches to overcoming the challenges of writing screen stories about monarchs and royalty.

The question of sympathy

One of the trickier tasks when writing about monarchs is calibrating audience sympathy. Real historical figures who held enormous power often made decisions about war, religion, empire, succession that had devastating consequences for others. A drama that simply invites us to identify with and root for such a figure risks appearing morally tone-deaf. Ways to tackle this include:

1. Acknowledge the moral complexity

Mary Queen of Scots (2018) invites sympathy for Mary while also depicting the real consequences of her decisions. The film doesn’t excuse her, it contextualises her – showing the constraints she operated under while being honest about her flaws and misjudgements.

2. Limit the story’s scope

The King’s Speech (2010) centres on George VI’s struggle to overcome his speech impediment in time to lead his country into war. The story sidesteps many of the thornier questions about monarchy and privilege. Instead, we’re rooting for a man to find his voice, rather than being asked to endorse the institution he represents.

The Madness of King George (1994) takes a similar approach, using George III’s mental illness as the lens through which to examine power, vulnerability, and the fragility of the monarchy as an institution.

In both cases, the physical or psychological struggle of the monarch becomes the engine of the drama, creating intimacy and sympathy without requiring the audience to endorse the broader system.

3. Surrogate viewpoint

Here, someone outside the immediate royal circle gives the audience a way into the world. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (adapted for TV in 2015) uses Thomas Cromwell as the lens through which we experience the Tudor court. We see Henry VIII from a slight remove, which allows the drama to hold him at a more ambiguous distance than a straight biopic might.

Classic films A Man for All Seasons (1966) and Becket (1964) both use the clash between a monarch (Henry VIII and Henry II respectively) and a man of principle (Thomas More and Thomas Becket) to create drama in which the king is less protagonist than force of nature, the immovable object against which the protagonist must define himself.

The surrogate viewpoint also solves a structural problem: monarchs, by their very nature, tend to have things done for them rather than doing things themselves. A servant, adviser, or courtier is often a more active protagonist in narrative terms more likely to be in motion, making choices, taking risks.

The monarch in a supporting role

Not every story about the world of monarchy needs a monarch at its centre. Some of the most effective uses of royal figures in fact-based drama place the king or queen in a supporting role. They are present enough to shape the world of the story, but not so dominant as to demand the kind of sustained dramatic justification that a fully-fledged royal protagonist requires.

Shakespeare in Love (1998), a largely fictional story set against a documented historical backdrop, offers a great example of this technique. Queen Elizabeth I (Judi Dench, in an Oscar-winning performance, despite barely 15 minutes of screen time) appears only occasionally, but her presence casts a long shadow over every scene. She is used to raise the stakes, resolve the plot, and embody the power of the world in which the characters exist. The monarch as deus ex machina, essentially but deployed with enough wit and economy that it feels entirely earned.

The Queen (2006) offers a more complex example. Queen Elizabeth II is nominally the central figure. But the story is equally about Tony Blair and his relationship to the institution she represents. The monarchy functions almost as a character in its own right, a system of values and protocols that Blair must negotiate and the Queen must defend – while both characters are humanised through their private reactions to the death of Diana. The result is a film that uses the monarch to examine something larger than any individual: the tension between tradition and modernity in British public life.

Mrs Brown (1997) takes yet another angle, using Queen Victoria’s relationship with her servant John Brown as a way to explore grief, duty, and the strange loneliness of absolute power. Victoria is very much the protagonist, but the drama gains much of its force from the contrast between her status and her emotional need. The monarchy here is not so much a system as a prison, and the relationship with Brown is her one unguarded window onto the world outside it.

The lesson from all these examples the same: a monarch doesn’t need to carry the whole story to be dramatically essential. Sometimes the most powerful thing a royal figure can do in a screenplay is stand at the edge of the story and remind everyone – characters and audience alike – of the world they’re all living in.

Dramatized reality

This approach offers an imagining of events rather than a claim to literal truth. One of the best known examples is The Crown (2016-2023), which employs dramatic license when it comes to private conversations that no-one (except those in the room at the time) were privy to.

This type of storytelling requires writers to be clear-eyed about what they’re doing and honest about the distinction between fact and invention.

Making your story relevant

The most common failure mode for royal drama is a kind of heritage glossiness, with beautiful costumes, stately interiors, and polished performances in service of a story that never quite explains why we should care.

The trap is to assume that the spectacle is sufficient, and to forget that audiences need an emotional stake.

The best royal dramas earn their audiences by rooting the story in recognisable human experience: the impossible demands of a powerful parent, the loneliness of a gilded cage, the cost of a life lived entirely in public. These are not abstract themes they connect to real experiences that viewers bring to the screen.

A Royal Affair (2012) draws on the real story of an affair between a court physician and a Danish queen to explore ideas about Enlightenment values, political reform, and the crushing of progressive ideas by entrenched power – themes that land differently but no less powerfully in the 21st century.

Knowing what your royal drama is really about will keep you on track when the research threatens to overwhelm the storytelling.

Cultural and historical distance

Royal dramas about non-British monarchies often travel better internationally. This is partly because the distance of history, culture or geography helps audiences engage with the human story without the political baggage.

That distance may also explain why US audiences are notoriously drawn to dramas about the British Royal Family as kind of lavish soap operas rather than accurate depictions of historical events.

This also highlights another issue relevant to writing about royals: the different dramatic standards which attach to recent history.

Later seasons of The Crown received widespread criticism over the treatment of Diana, Princess of Wales. Not only was she a beloved figure, but her death was relatively recent and those in her orbit are still alive and remain active royals.

This raises the kind of ethical questions that often come into play when we adapt real events for the screen.

Legal considerations

Dramatizing historical monarchies – those sufficiently distant in time that no living participants are involved – is relatively straightforward from a legal perspective. Once you move into the 20th and 21st centuries, things become considerably more complicated.

Living members of royal families are private individuals with the same rights of privacy and reputation as anyone else. The key questions to ask are:

• are any living individuals depicted in ways that could damage their reputation?
• can the distinction between fact and dramatic invention be clearly established?

As always, this is an area where awareness of legal issues is important and you should seek professional guidance on the law.

In summary

When writing about royals, the main thing to think about is how to make them relatable. Strip away the titles and trappings you have human beings who were born into (or married into) a world where they aren’t free to live as common folk but who still experience the same emotions, traumas and family conflicts.

Finally, rather than seeing the institution as a barrier that keeps audiences at arms length, the best screen stories about royalty use it as a pressure cooker that heightens the drama across the board.