Digital Cover: Forever Young Royals

The cast of Young Royals are sitting around a long table at a hip restaurant in Södermalm. Someone shouts out a request for “Vi ska aldrig gå hem” by Molly Sandén and when it comes, as if by magic, blaring through the speakers, the whole gang sings along. Omar Rudberg, looking dapper in a matching printed Louis Vuitton fit, stands and raises his glass of sparkling wine in a toast.

They appear like any group of young, especially attractive, well-dressed friends catching a celebratory meal together, save for the snap of our photographer’s camera. Still, the vibes are not for show; the camaraderie between this group – the gentle teasing, the easy laughs, the hugs and cuddles – is palpable.

It has been over a year since Young Royals season one landed on Netflix, forever changing the lives of its stars. The story of a Swedish prince who falls in love with another boy at boarding school was a modern conceit, to be sure, but in the wrong hands it could have easily come and gone as another unremarkable teen drama. No one, least of all the cast, could have predicted the explosive response to the series.

“I remember the engagement beforehand was pretty low,” notes Edvin Ryding, who plays the aforementioned Prince Wilhelm. There was a simmering excitement among a select few (he recalls one comment that read, simply, “Looks gay, I’m in!”), but the overall anticipation was nothing noteworthy.

To say that things changed within a day would be inaccurate. In fact, things changed after just six hours, the total runtime of season one. That’s when the comments, fan reaction videos and, perhaps most notably, Instagram followers started to roll in at an almost alarming rate. “It still never ceases to amaze me,” Ryding says. “People are still discovering it.”

Young Royals season two is set to reignite Young Royals mania (though, incredibly, the mania has barely subsided). We pick up with our beloved characters heading back to fictional boarding school Hillerska, reeling from the events of last season. Wilhelm and his love interest, Simon (Rudberg), navigate their “breakup” while the prince seeks revenge on his own cousin, arrogant bad guy August (played with aplomb by Malte Gårdinger). Dramatics, temper tantrums and raucous party scenes ensue.

In the meantime, Ryding and his co-stars – Rudberg, Nikita Uggla, Gårdinger and Frida Argento – have had time to digest the insanity of their experience. It’s been a strange year, in which the cast went from regular adolescents to regulars on Sweden’s biggest red carpets. There have been brand sponsorships and modelling gigs. International magazine covers and swanky fashion dinners. On the flip side, there has been high school (Ryding) and summer jobs (Uggla and Argento).

The whirlwind began, as many star-making stories do, with a series of auditions. “I had the worst experience before I got to the casting,” Rudberg recalls. “I couldn’t find the place – I went the wrong way.” He arrived to the Young Royals audition five minutes late, sweaty and stressed out. Rudberg was no stranger to the spotlight; he first rose to fame as a member of One Direction-esque Swedish boy band FO&O at age 14 and currently enjoys a thriving career as a solo artist. However, he was brand new to acting, adding an extra layer of anxiety.

And there he was, Ryding, already sitting in the audition room. “We didn’t even have time to say hi,” says Rudberg. “I just sat next to him and we started.” At 18, Ryding has had more audition experience than most; he’s been working steadily as an actor in Swedish films and television series since he was just six years old.

“I remember that he laid down on me, on my legs, looking up and I started touching his hair,” says Rudberg. “And I just remember thinking, ‘Oh shit, this dude is so good’.” From that moment, he “just felt it’s going to be us”.

Rudberg was hardly the only actor considered. Even Gårdinger, who wound up playing August, Wilhelm’s villainous cousin, originally went in for Simon (“I’m pretty tall, it wouldn’t have worked,” Gårdinger says). Ryding met “a few Simons” throughout his audition process. “It was weird,” he says. “I think one of them was an extra later on.” But from that first audition with Rudberg, Ryding agrees that they “just clicked”.

After the audition, Rudberg sent Ryding a DM, asking if they could meet up for coffee. “I instantly wanted to become friends with him,”Rudberg says. They kept in touch. Eventually, while at Central Station in Stockholm, Ryding got the call offering him the role of Wilhelm. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, oh my god, yes! Finally!’” he recalls. About a month later, Rudberg was offered Simon.

“It was a done deal the first time I saw them together during the casting process,” says Rojda Sekersöz, conceptual director. “I think chemistry is not something magical that just appears from nowhere. It appears when you're brave enough to open up your energy field to someone else, and the other person does the same and you hold hands and dance together.”

Fans held a similar sentiment. The response to – or rather, obsession with – Ryding and Rudberg’s on-screen romance is at the heart of Young Royals’ runaway success. It’s an obsession that’s supported by their flourishing off-screen friendship, occasionally alluded to via social media. Heading into season two, they’re both pushing two million Instagram followers.

Not since Norway’s Skam, in 2015, has a Scandinavian teen series – and its emerging stars – had such global impact. And while Skam was certainly an international phenomenon, it was also, at the time, relatively challenging to watch outside of Norway. Local super-fans would meticulously put English subtitles on each episode, before making the subtitled content available for not-so-legal download. Young Royals, in addition to being well-written, gorgeously acted and stunningly visualised, is backed up by the phenomenal power of Netflix. In November, Young Royals season two will launch globally on the streaming platform to 221 million users in over 190 countries.

While the co-leads’ post-show blow-up has been the most extreme, it is an experience shared by the entire main cast. “When the Instagram followers started to roll in, I didn’t check my Instagram so much,” says Uggla. “It was kind of scary in the beginning.” The 21-year-old actress, who plays Felice, the super posh cool girl with a heart of gold, nearly missed her opportunity to audition. The casting department had been sending requests for a self-tape to her old email. Eventually, they gave her a call instead. “Thank god my number was the same,” she says.

Soon, Uggla was on the train from her tiny hometown in Skåne to an in-person audition in Stockholm. While she wasn’t necessarily what series creator and head writer Lisa Ambjörn had envisioned for Felice, the young actress was a revelatory surprise. “We really struggled finding the perfect actor for that role,” says Ambjörn. "Nikita came in and just gave her this calm comfortableness that highlighted Felice’s insecurities and issues in a refreshing way."

Though she now lives in Stockholm, when season one dropped, Uggla was back in Skåne, waitressing. It was her older brothers who kept tabs on their sister’s growing celebrity. “I see the family group chat and my brothers were like, ‘Oh my god, you have, like, 20,000 followers,’” Uggla says. “No wait, it’s going up. Now you have 80,000.”

It was bizarre at first, trying to decipher if people were staring because they recognised her from the show or if they were staring because she was “doing something weird”. But eventually Uggla settled into her new reality. Soon she was doing front-facing TikToks, in which she interacts with fans directly, taking on select brand sponsorships (among them, sustainable shoe brand Toms) and even walking the runway for Ganni during Copenhagen Fashion Week. “It was an experience I never would have dreamed of,” she says of her runway debut. “Walking in a fashion show? That’s crazy to me.”

For Uggla, her purpose goes beyond simply enjoying (and capitalising on) her big moment. Growing up, she didn’t have many role models she could relate to. “Beyoncé and Rihanna were the only two black people I could see on TV,” she says (coincidentally, Rihanna is Rudberg’s long-time role model, too). “I want to be that person that people can look up to.” She often speaks candidly about self-confidence, self-love and body positivity on her platforms. “Let’s be honest, I don’t look like most of the influencers you see on social media,” she says. “I just want to make sure the fans are seeing different types of women.”

On set, Uggla has found a best friend in Argento, who plays Simon’s introverted sister, Sara. Their relationship blossomed, much like it does in season one, over horses. In the show, Sara and Felice become unlikely friends as the former, who works in the boarding school’s stables, teaches the latter to ride. “We had training alone sometimes, with the horses,” says Argento. “That’s when we really bonded.” Uggla recalls venting to Argento about an impending breakup with her then-boyfriend on the car rides to and from horse training. Today, a picture of the duo is the background on Uggla’s iPhone.

Argento came into the cast late, after the originally-cast Sara dropped out during pre-production. She’s quick to point out that while her life has certainly been altered by Young Royals, it isn’t as though she’s living in the lap of Hollywood luxury. “I saw a page where it said my net worth was, like, one million dollars,” she says, laughing at the absurdity of the notion. While she will attend the odd fashion event (with Uggla, usually) she generally shies away from opportunities beyond her craft. “I love acting, but I don't really love to be the centre of attention,” she says, adding that the initial boost in Instagram followers made her “scared as f***”.

“In the beginning, it was really exciting to get things for free,” Argento admits. “You were getting paid to post and things like that. But I found myself getting anxious doing it and didn’t like it, because it felt so fake.” She doesn’t judge others for taking advantage of these sorts of opportunities – she’ll even dabble herself, on rare occasions. Between seasons, she worked at a pizzeria.

If Argento is a little bit disinterested in the trappings of fame, Gårdinger, whose father Pontus Gårdinger is a well-known Swedish actor and presenter, is even less interested. When the first season came out, he was in the countryside, so he “didn’t really get the hype”. “I saw the followers and was like, ‘Oh, OK, that’s unexpected, but I’ll take it’,” he says. However, when he returned to Stockholm, things got “a bit weird”. “In the beginning, I was a bit more nervous than the people that were coming up to me.”

By now, Young Royals fans know that Gårdinger, 22, could not be further from the often- obnoxious high-schooler he plays on-screen. “I thought that people were going to hate me pretty hard when the show came out,” he says. “But they pretty quickly saw the differences.” The word his castmates lovingly use to describe him is “goofy”. “He’s just a sweet little bunny,” says Rudberg. Gårdinger is “not a big Instagram guy”. He doesn’t check his DMs – he hardly checks his emails.

Ryding tells me he’s taking a breather from social media as well. “I get very affected,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be in a negative way, I just realised it takes up a lot of my time.” The youngest in the main cast, Ryding spent his time between seasons back at high school. In an experience that mirrors that of Prince Wilhelm, Ryding immediately felt all eyes on him. “It was pretty meta,” he says. “It was a bit difficult to cope with – that was supposed to be my free zone.”

There are upsides, of course. I first met Ryding and Rudberg at a Prada dinner in Stockholm around this time last year. The season one hype was at a fever pitch and they were both enjoying the moment. I’ve run into them a handful of times since, sometimes together, sometimes not – at a Cartier party, a VMAN dinner, at the Cannes film festival. A year later, it’s not as if anyone is shying away from the spotlight – we’re on set with Vogue, after all – they’ve just learned to set boundaries and navigate the madness a bit better. “Omar has taught me a lot about the right to say no,” says Ryding.

And when they need that bit of extra support, they turn to each other. “We’ve gotten so close. We all went through the exact same thing with blowing up and being recognised,” says Argento. “That would have been hard to do alone.” When Uggla sees her castmates, she always does the “real check-ins”. She’ll ask, “How are you?” And then, “But how are you really?”

The family-like dynamic of the Young Royals cast is confirmed by the show’s creator. “Even if everything hasn’t been completely free of friction – no relationships are and film sets are very stressful – I think it’s the genuine care between them all that has turned them into a very tight-knitted group off-camera,” says Ambjörn, noting that they manage to be “kind and funny towards each other every step of the way”. “To me, that’s truly magical and beautiful.”

I catch Ryding and Rudberg sitting away from the group, eating the photo-friendly lunch that was prepared for the shoot, and join them at their table. I tell them I want to get all the real dirt, for the fans. “For the last time, we are not a couple,” jokes Rudberg. Still, they’re in fairly constant communication, texting, calling, sending random Snapchats (recently, Rudberg sent an unprompted Snap of a squirrel). They’ll text to ask each other what they’re wearing to an event, or how long they plan on staying. Normal stuff, really.

There’s been just one downside to this closeness. It emerged while filming season two, during their romantically- charged scenes (which, let’s face it, is any scene in which the duo appears together). “We were going to do these scenes that were dramatic, and we couldn’t do it,” says Ryding. “In the beginning, we would just laugh.”

The thing they admire most in each other? “You project self-confidence,” Ryding says to Rudberg. “And you trust yourself and you stand up for what you think is right, no matter what.” Rudberg admires Ryding’s “hard work.” “You’re really a hard worker,” he says.

“This is like couples therapy,” says Ryding. “I like Omar’s curls.”

If one member of the cast is most ready, willing and prepared to embrace the hype, it’s Rudberg. Miraculously, despite his soaring music career and starring role in a hit Netflix series, he remains almost impossibly sweet. He’s here for all of it – the followers, the increased attention on his music, the fashion. “I’m sitting here wearing Louis Vuitton,” he says, smiling. “That’s crazy.”