In October 2020, Dominic West was photographed kissing and canoodling with Lily James in Italy. The problem was that West has been married to an Irish aristocrat for years. The whole affair blew up in the British and American press, and it looked like Catherine FitzGerald might actually leave him and file for divorce. She didn’t though. Less than a month after the affair, Dominic somehow persuaded his wife to do a series of bizarre photo-ops, including one where they walked arm-in-arm in front of the waiting paparazzi. They got through it and their marriage survived. Dominic has mostly avoided talking about it, but he was profiled by the Times of London and he ended up referencing the affair a few times. Some highlights from the Times:
It’s a relief to not play a posh bloke for a change: “But my wife, who is genuinely upper class, always tells me, ‘You’re much better in the working-class parts, you’re not very good as upper class, you’re not convincing at all.’ And I agree with her…. I’m McNulty, and I’m Jean Valjean [in a TV version of Les Misérables] and I’m Iago [with a broad Yorkshire accent in a Sheffield Crucible production of Othello in 2011]. I think those are my best roles. Some people look good in stiff collars but I don’t think I’m one of them. I understand upper-class attitudes and ways, and I like those characters, but as an outsider.”
He did go to Eton, although he doesn’t come from “old money”: “Maybe we all have some difficulty in fitting in, and that’s why being sent away to Eton was so useful. It made me quite resilient. It gave me a sense of detachment or dislocation that was useful…. Once I worked through the trauma.”
The Lily James affair and playing Prince Charles: “Definitely. I’d had a very acute understanding of what it’s like to feel the horror of your name or your photograph coming up in the newspapers. There is that dreadful freezing moment when something is being revealed about you. I think anyone can understand how that feels. But I’d been through it a couple of years previously and it must have informed how I approached it. That gut feeling of horror isn’t something you get inured to.”
On Ruth Wilson feeling exploited on ‘The Affair’: “Um … we … we talked a lot about it and I suppose I did experience it. I don’t really like talking about it but … yeah, everything Ruth has said is absolutely right.”
Any upsides to the Lily James incident? “I hesitate to speak on my wife’s behalf because it was obviously horrible, particularly for her,” he says. And then he gives out a cackle, all the tension escaping from him like air from a balloon. “But we do joke about it sometimes. Because whenever we went out together, the papers would always say we were ‘putting on a show of unity’. Even if we’d just been rowing about parking the car or whatever, even if that couldn’t be further from the truth. And so when we go out we do sort of say, ‘Shall we go and have a show of unity up in London?’
Yeah, just further evidence that the “upper class” is simply built different. Dominic’s actions and behavior were humiliating for his wife, but she simply kept calm and carried on and now they’re fine-ish. I would imagine he was in the doghouse for a while, just as I would imagine that Catherine probably set some new rules. But all in all, he got away with it because the upper class would rather just stay married to a cheater than have some scandalous divorce. Plus, we don’t know what Catherine is up to – it could be that she’s having just as much fun, but she’s simply more discreet.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, WENN.