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Once upon a time in a faraway land—or as it’s more common- ly referred: London—a boy destined to become a prince was born. No, replacing a Santa Barbara-absconded red head wasn’t written into his story (we’ll leave that sort of magic to Oprah), but becoming Prince Charming certainly was. And as they’ll say: if the shoe fits... wear it. So, Actor Nicholas Galitzine shall embody the famous knight in shining armor for new Sony Classics’ Cinderella, opposite his glass-slipper-wearing princess (screen-debuting pop superstar, Camilla Cabello).
But why? We hear it all the time when attempting to person- ify someone: His smile would light up a room. Arguably one of the more overused figures of speech, thrown around willy-nilly. Not everyone who enters a room can light it up with an electric smile and magnetic personality and so they shouldn’t be described as such. But Galitzine isn’t everyone. “You’ve got really cool vinyl albums on your wall!” he exclaims as he enters our early morning video call, and you’d think I’d pumped up my computer screen’s brightness. Corny, but true. If he’s making this impression virtual- ly, how glowing must that audition have been?
Although we’ll be seeing him on-screen as Prince Robert
in July, (the trailer for the film is still under wraps at the time of this article’s publishing, so mystery abounds), Galitzine almost ruled out playing princely characters entirely. “Playing a prince, in a lot of ways, for a lot of projects, I think can be very one-di- mensional,” he says. “Funnily enough, I auditioned for another prince, right before Cinderella, and got all the way through the process, and kept thinking how I was trepidatious about it be- cause the character seemed to tread the same path as all of these other one dimensional princes. I got right down to the director session, and it didn’t go my way. I called my agents and I said, ‘I just think I need to swear off of princes for a little bit because it just didn’t feel very gratifying.’”
But as the Cinderella story will tell us, some rules are meant to be broken. As soon as Galitzine read the mission statement for the new music-centric Cinderella, his interest piqued. He describes Prince Robert as “much more multifaceted than his other princely contemporaries” and was eager to jump into the role. “For a lot of young actors being a prince, it might on the outside seem superficially like a great thing. Creatively, though, it might feel kind of repressed, but it certainly was not that experience for me.”
Unlike a lot of the talent in young Hollywood, Galitzine didn’t have his acting debut while still in diapers or in between middle school classes. While many of his acting contemporaries were springing from A-list offspring onto blockbuster film sets, Galitzine was living the life of a student-athlete in the United Kingdom. He was a shy, sensitive kid who spent most of his time playing rugby with his peers. “I was in an all-boys school, which very much sort of promoted the machismo that comes with sports,” he tells me. “I never really gave myself the opportunity to kind of be creative at anything.”
Blessings often come in disguise. After suffering from sev- eral rugby-related injuries and consequently falling out of love with the sport, the actor wrote off his original plan of playing professionally. Meanwhile, most of his peers were arranging their plans to go to university, but that didn’t feel like the right fit. With a burning desire to try something new, he went out on a limb and shared his interest in becoming an actor with his peers. “I had voiced these hopes and aspirations to some of my friends who had been actors throughout school,” he recalls, “and they were very much saying, like, ‘Oh, it’s too late to get into acting. You have to start when you’re really young.’” But Galitzine was determined to not let this narrowness discourage him. “I think the fact that there really isn’t a rule set for when you have to do it, or an age you should get into it, is kind of a freeing thing.”
So Galitizine attended the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. There, he experienced the world class performing arts festival, was ex- posed to all ages of boundary-pushing self-expression, and was hastily discovered by his agents. “It’s crazy how the stars kind of
aligned and everything fell into place,” he remarks, shaking his head a bit in disbelief. “My agents literally plucked me out of obscurity.”
Following the fringe experience, Galitizine cut to the center and stepped into his first audition at 20-years old, for an indie film called The Beat Beneath My Feet. Nervous and with little knowledge of the intricacies of the film industry, he left the audition with the role, which would see him star alongside the late Luke Perry. “It was one of the most terrifying and rewarding experiences I had,” he remembers.
Not every role thereafter would come so easy, and true to the challenges of the industry, there were misses concurrent to the successes of screen-sharing with two-time Latin-Grammy award winner Camilla Cabello and Pierce Brosnan (his “James Bond growing up”) in Cinderella, and Quentin Tarinto’s right- hand woman, Uma Thurman, in Netflix’s 2019 horror series Chambers, and a string of film and television performances.
Perhaps the resilience Galitizine learned from playing sports has equipped him for the tough and tumble nature of the film world, but regardless, he likes how the story has thus far unfolded. As for the next chapter? Galitzine feels his tale is yet to be truly told, but we imagine it will conclude with a happily ever after.
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FENDI shirt, top, and pants and GRENSON shoes. PAUL THOMAS flowers.