Lisa Ambjörn is the co-creator, showrunner, head writer, and executive producer of the hit Netflix series Young Royals starring Edvin Ryding and Omar Rudberg which centres on the tumultuous romance of a 16-year-old Swedish prince, Wilhelm (Ryding), who falls in love with a working class fellow teenager, Simon (Rudberg). With the third and final season now streaming on Netflix, bidding farewell to the show has been an emotional experience for countless Young Royals fans around the world. As Ambjörn shares with The Queer Review, saying goodbye to the show was similarly moving for her and the entire creative team. “I’ve never cried so much in my entire life”, says Ambjörn as she describes what it was like on set during the last day of filming.
Looking back across the three seasons, Lisa Ambjörn speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about the show’s origins, the queer aspect of the narrative, what it has been like to work with Edvin and Omar as they portrayed the show’s star-crossed lovers, and how she went about working with the production team to keep the series feeling grounded.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: taking you back to when the idea for Young Royals first came to you, was there always that queer love story at the centre and what has your approach as a writer been to Wilhelm and Simon’s sexuality?
Lisa Ambjörn: “The proper Young Royals heads know that it was the production company that pitched me what then became Young Royals. What was in that document was completely different, it was another genre, there were other characters, but they did have a prince who was maybe queer and it was at a boarding school. So that’s what I took with me from that pitch and then I recreated what is the show now.”
“That was what started the whole question in me, because there are always rumours about royalty. I had never really thought about the fact that Sweden is a monarchy. In school, I can’t remember if we even spoke about what it meant, or how it was a part of our democracy. I’d never seen a fictionalized story about the Swedish royal family, which actually brings up these questions about how we are born into roles in society. We’re born into a social class and an ethnicity and a sexuality and gender, whatever it is. How does that affect our life choices and who we can become or can’t become? I thought that this was the perfect story to explore that and to take the queerness that I would have loved to have seen with my friends when I grew up and bring up these topics. So yeah, it’s always been a queer love story.”
I love how you mention being queer as one element in these characters lives. It’s just one part of our identity as LGBTQ+ people, it might be a really important one, but it isn’t what completely defines us.
“No, we can be more things at a time and also I think it says so much about our society and our options and our ideas about whether we are shaped by our biology or by our environment? That’s so infinitely interesting to me, out of all the aspects of the show, and in this third season we’ve really been able to highlight that even more and bring it into the school and have all those nuances there. Even though it has been there throughout the show. For Wilhelm, his biggest issue isn’t his queerness, it’s his role as Crown Prince, but his queerness makes him have to rethink these structures and this history and this narrative that he has never really thought about before. His big brother, Erik, maybe didn’t have to do that. So that’s what’s interesting.”
There is so much going on in this third season, as always with Young Royals, but my favourite scenes are when we get to see Simon and Wilhelm alone. What are those scenes like to write?
“They are some of my favourite scenes to write as well. One of my favourite scenes this season is the baking scene. Every scene I make, or my team makes, is questioned from a budget perspective. You have to be able to say what the necessity of each scene is because otherwise it’ll be cut. People were like, ‘Why are we doing this baking scene? It serves no purpose in the story’. I was like, ‘I just need them to bake! I’ve just got it in my head now.'”
“It’s so amazing to write these characters because in my head they are both still these fictional characters that I lived with before we cast Edwin and Omar and every one else. But now there’s also another layer to it in what I know they can achieve. For me, a script has to be inspiring and it should be a good reading experience. It has to make everyone feel like we know what we’re telling and we know what we’re doing. It’s also a technical instruction for the team, but it’s something we can constantly change and improve and try to have fun with as long as we all know where a scene is heading and the energies that we are coming in and out with of the scene. What is beautiful with our actors is that we can always improvise because they are so amazing, so it also gives a lot of edge to those scenes.”
What has it been like to see Edvin and Omar bring these characters to life across these three seasons and did you see them bringing something new this time?
“Oh, absolutely. I think I actually understood who they were as actors this season because they’ve also done such a big journey together. I think this season was so fueled by a creative, comfortable, trustworthy force and it was so amazing. The first season was really stressful to make, it was a lot of pressure on everyone and I was almost gaslighting myself into thinking, ‘Oh, you have to really overwork yourself to be able to say that you’ve pushed everything you can’. Then when we came into the second season, I sat down with the producers and we were like, ‘How can we reshape this and what mistakes are we not allowed to do again that we did on the first season production-wise?’ We went through everything and it was much better the second season.”
“This third season everything clicked. I’m so proud of the production part of it. Every single take with the actors this season is brilliant, all of it. They are very different personality-wise, but when they’re in front of the camera you can really see the steps that they’ve taken professionally and in their skills and suddenly you’re like, ‘We can do anything’. That’s how they make me feel and that’s very inspiring as a writer to have.”
Like I mentioned, there’s a lot going on, the stakes are high, there’s a lot of drama and intrigue, but you manage to keep things feeling quite grounded. How do you go about doing that? One thing that helps to make things feel real for me is the handheld camera work.
“It’s the camera, it’s the lighting, it’s our set design, it’s our costume design, it’s our makeup, it’s everything. The whole team is so brilliant at getting the story across and finding nuances and depth from the script and from our discussions. It’s often the case that they also come with suggestions like, ‘Oh, actually, we can say that with our set design, so you don’t need to have that in the line’. All of the things that they come with are so valuable to me. Especially this season, I am also really proud that the pacing is so where it should be.”
“Like you say, yes, it is very high stakes and it’s been that way throughout. I mean, in the first season Wilhelm’s brother dies and he becomes Crown Prince, it’s so dramatic. But it is about finding the everyday life in the school around them and I do think that’s beautiful. The costumes this season, for example, are actually all very synchronized. All of our extras have their own wardrobes, which is very uncommon, we don’t usually do that on a show like this. But at the same time, it doesn’t feel like it was a thought and that we’re trying to make something completely crazy. It is very realistic in everything else, except maybe some of the story elements and I think that is the balance that I love with our show that we’ve managed to create together. I am super proud of everyone who has achieved that.”
How about the music, because that’s another really important element isn’t it; the score and the song choices? When the song “Arcade” by Duncan Laurence comes in at one point this season that really hit me.
“We have a great music supervisor and we have have a great composer. This season we also really played with silences a lot more than we have before. We let some scenes be very quiet and then were very particular about our music choice when it actually comes in. Matti Bye—who is the composer for Young Royals—I’ve loved his music since season one, but we also find every season we have been like, ‘Okay, how do we tweak it? How do we make it slightly new all the time, so that you’re constantly feeling like this world is building, and building, and building, and becoming bigger, and bigger, and not just stick with what works just because it works.”
“Jerry Carlsson is one of the three directors this season. He is brilliant and he has made a lot of great queer short films. He said to me, and I’d never really thought about it like this before, ‘You have to imagine the series as 100% with the image and the sound and the music, but then you have to give it different percentages in different scenes. You can’t have 100% of everything. It needs to be like, 50% what we see, 25% what we hear in the sound’. Of course, I knew that that was right, but he just put it into words, and I was like, ‘Oh, yes, that’s why I’m feeling like we should actually try to be quiet in this take’. It’s a beautiful way to collaborate and to find the balance within the show.”
Were you able to be on set for when the final shot of the season and the series was being filmed and if so what was the atmosphere like on set?
“This season I’m also executive producing, which has been such an amazing journey. I’ve loved doing this role of being both the head writer and producing. So I was on set a lot the season, almost every day. On the last day of the shoot, I’ve never cried so much in my entire life. I cried so much that in all of the pictures from that day I’m swollen. I look crazy in the documentary that they’ve made. I’m just crying in the corners everywhere, it’s ridiculous!”
“It was very heartbreaking because the last scene was with Wilhelm and Simon, Edwin and Omar, and it was literally us saying goodbye to each other as colleagues, but also to the characters that we’ve all been part of creating in this team. It was spectacular and the scenes that we shot are spectacular. The vibe on set was so amazing. Everyone was having the best time, everyone was sitting crying. Everyone was hugging each other. I had goosebumps, it was so beautiful and it’s probably one of the things that I will carry with me the most from this entire work. I feel so blessed to have been part of this.”
By James Kleinmann
All six episodes of the third and final season of Young Royals are now streaming globally on Netflix. Follow Lisa Ambjörn on Instagram @lisa_ambjorn and visit her official website.
Thank you for this amazing interview and for asking such great questions, especially about the music! The music, the sounds, the silence, the way their harmony brings even more power into each scene is always a pure joy to witness. Young Royals is a masterpiece 👑
Thank you for this amazing interview and for asking such great questions, especially about the music! The music, the sounds, the silence and the way their harmony brings even more power to each scene is always a pure delight to witness. Young Royals is a masterpiece 👑