11/03/2013 - Danish actor-director Christian Tafdrup prepares biopic of the Danish Crown Prince's Frederik’s early years "when he struggled to come to terms with his predestined fate"

Danish actor-director Christian Tafdrup, who has most recently been in several Danish high-profile television series including Borgen/Government, The Killing (3) and Park Road, is preparing a biopic of HRH Danish Crown Prince Frederik (photo), portraying the young heir to the throne struggling to come to terms with his predestined fate.

Currently working on the script with Johs Lynge, Tafdrup will concentrate on now 44-year-old Frederik’s life in a 12-year-period from the early 1990s, including his voyage to the Olympics in Australia 2000, where he met Mary Elizabeth Donaldson whom he later married. The Danish Film Institute has chipped in €27,000 development support for the project, which Danish major Nordisk Film and commercial pubcaster TV2/Danmark will realise.

So far he has spent a year on research and interviews with people close to the royals, but he is not looking for sensational revelations from his private life. "We have talked a lot about the film you cannot do. A fictional film about the royal family built on facts, inspired by the international wave of biopics about living people, can be a dangerous area, but that is also part of the motivation,” he told Danish film magazine Ekko.

"Royals are good characters in films – they have a god-like status and at the same time they must face the same challenges as everyone else. Crown Prince Frederik is a good example of a young man who must adjust himself to a difficult role – his real-life story could hardly be written better by an author, and it could make a compelling film," added Ekko editor Claus Christensen. Principal photography for Frederik’s Early Days is scheduled for next year.

US director Martha Coolidge’s 2004 feature, The Prince and Me, was loosely inspired by Crown Prince Frederik and Mary’s romance. Upcoming biopics of royals include French director Olivier Dahan’s Grace of Monaco, about Hollywood star Grace Kelly’s crisis of identity, when she married Monaco’s Prince Rainier III, and German director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Diana, about Princess Diana’s affair with UK-Pakistani surgeon Hasnat Ahmad Khan).