When we talk about perfect casting, this is what we’re talking about. Nicholas Galitzine, one of the romantic leads in Prime Video’s Red, White, and Royal Blue, was all but destined for his role as the hot, gay Prince Henry George Edward James of Wales. In another life, he could’ve been a prince himself.
This weekend, Red, White & Royal Blue viewers began circulating a gif of Galitzine doing some capital a Acting in a scene with Taylor Zakhar Perez’s Alex. And Twitter user @filmlamet added to the conversation with a note about Galitzine’s family history. “The way this gif only exists because the russian revolution forced the golitsyn noble family into exile so today nicholas galitzine has to have an actual job and not rely on centuries-old family wealth omg,” she wrote.
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Thanks to the sleuthing lead of @filmlamet, we did some further digging. Of course, we don’t know for sure the details of Galitzine’s family lineage, but here is the hypothesis. Nicholas Galitzine’s mother is Greek, and his father is Russian. The last name, Galitzine, is a spelling derivation of the name Golitsyn, making him a likely descendent of the House of Golitsyn, a family of nobility during the Russian empire, though the family itself descends from Lithuania.
Related: Red, White & Royal Blue Stars Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine Know Their Movie Is Hot
So what happened to the family, and what led Nicholas Galitzine to have to find work as an actor rather than subsisting on empire money? It seems there were just way too many of them. "So numerous are the Golitsyns that soon it will be impossible to mention any of them without the family tree at hand," wrote 19th century Russian memoirist Filipp Vigel. The family was founded in the 15th century, descending from the Grand Duke of Lithuania. Over time, the house had split into four branches, and by the 1700’s, one of the branches lost its influence and died out. In 1917, all but one branch were exiled or extinguished because of the Russian Revolution.
In this timeline, Nicholas Galitzine gets to wear the image of a royal (in the 2021 Cinderella, too, where he played Prince Robert) if that’s not what the fates had written for him — being a Prince is surely second nature. And while he doesn’t have that royal money, here’s to hoping something comes through on the royalties front.
