Editor’s note: this story previously was based on a misunderstanding of Eddie Redmayne’s quote about feeling sorry for Prince William. The Inquisitr regrets this error.
Prince Harry loved playing rugby back in his high school days at Eton, but he was a constant target of players from rival schools, says his former classmate Eddie Redmayne.
As ET Online reports, Eddie Redmayne, the star of the Fantastic Beasts franchise — which itself exists within J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe — was a classmate of Prince William’s back when the two attended Eton. Eton, for those not familiar, is a centuries-old and established private school attended by well-to-do young men of English high society.
William, coming from a long line of sportsmen, did what a lot of boys at Eton do — and took up playing rugby. There, he spent a great deal of time on the same pitch as Redmayne, who was also a fan of the sport. Redmayne tells Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen that he was actually good at rugby. But the boys who attended competing schools wanted a story that they could tell their kids someday — a story about the time they tackled the future King of England. And so William always had a target on his back, according to Redmayne.
“I always felt a bit sorry for him because basically any school you played, all they basically wanted to do was tackle Prince William and they could say, ‘I tackled Prince William.’ But if you were standing next to Prince William, like I was, it was actually quite easy and quite fun.”
Eddie Redmayne opens up about playing rugby with Prince William in his school days https://t.co/Ovc1TnDJPk
— ET Canada (@ETCanada) November 14, 2018
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the two former teammates have kept in touch since their days at Eton. Redmayne told a caller on the show that he was, regretfully, not invited to the royal wedding back when William married Kate Middleton. “It’s fine,” said Redmayne over the lack of invitation.
However, Redmayne did get a chance to visit another member of the royal family once his acting career took off. Back in 2016, Redmayne was granted the honor of the OBE — Order of the British Empire — which meant that he got a private audience with his old classmate’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth.
“You go to Windsor Castle and you queue up alongside the most extraordinary people, who have genuinely done brilliant things and you’re an actor and you feel a bit of a schmuck. And then you go through a door to meet the Queen and in that room is this huge assembly room of people.”
Prince William, for his part, has put his rugby playing days behind him — though he still supports the sport. As Kensington Palace revealed in a 2017 post, William was named the patron of the Welsh Rugby Union League.
