Dominic West's "affection" for King Charles has grown since witnessing his "unguarded moments" during his accession to the throne while mourning Queen Elizabeth.

The 53-year-old actor portrays the now-monarch when he was Prince of Wales in the upcoming season of the Netflix series 'The Crown', and he found moments such as him getting frustrated by a leaky pen during televised proceedings to be most "endearing".

Speaking to Radio Times magazine, Dominic said: "I've always really liked him, and I think that was enhanced in most people's eyes by the funeral, his involvement in it, and his accession, particularly the unguarded moments, which were really endearing and so different from the Queen.

"'That bloody pen.' My affection for him has grown even more."

Dominic also felt "extremely sympathetic" to King Charles and his now-wife Queen Consort Camilla after re-enacting the infamous 'Camillagate' scandal.

In 1993, an intimate conversation between Charles and his lover had been recorded years before it was made public, and Dominic recently admitted revisiting the call, which included the royal telling Camilla he wanted to "live inside" her trousers but it would be just his luck to be reincarnated as a tampon, has given him a new take on the controversy.

He said: "I remember thinking it was something so sordid and deeply, deeply embarrassing [at the time].

"Looking back on it, and having to play it, what you're conscious of is that the blame was not with these two people, two lovers, who were having a private conversation.

"What's really [clear now] is how invasive and disgusting was the press's attention to it, that they printed it out verbatim and you could call a number and listen to the actual tape.

"I think it made me extremely sympathetic towards the two of them and what they'd gone through."

Both Dominic and his co-star, Olivia Williams - who plays Camilla - were keen to show the couple as sympathetically as possible.

He said: "[Olivia is] extremely bright, she's extremely forthright, and she had straightaway a sympathy for Camilla, that I shared actually. We both felt that we wanted to do right by our characters. We felt the odds were slightly stacked against their relationship and we wanted to try and bring it across in as sympathetic a light as we could."