Digital Cover: Forever Young Royals

The cast of Young Royals are sitting at a long table in a trendy restaurant on Södermalm. Someone shouts out a wish to hear We'll Never Go Home by Molly Sandén, and when it magically blasts through the speakers, the whole gang sings along. Omar Rudberg, looking dapper and neat in a matching Louis Vuitton outfit, stands up and raises his glass of sparkling wine to toast.

They look like any other group of young, attractive, well-dressed friends celebrating over dinner, except for the sound of our photographer's camera. Yet the atmosphere is not for show, the camaraderie between everyone in the group – the banter, the spontaneous laughter, the hugs and touches – is palpable.

It's been over a year since the first season of Young Royals hit Netflix, forever changing the lives of its stars. The story of a Swedish prince who falls in love with a boy at boarding school was definitely a modern Cinderella story, but in the wrong hands it could have easily passed as just another uninspired teen drama. No one, least of all the cast, could have predicted the massive response the series would receive.

"I remember the advance interest was pretty weak," notes Edvin Ryding, who plays the aforementioned Prince Wilhelm. There was a bubbling anticipation among a few (he remembers a comment that read "Looks gay, I'm on!"), but the general interest was barely noticeable.

But everything didn’t change overnight. In fact, it only took six hours, the total running time of the first season. That’s when all the comments, fan reaction videos, and, perhaps most of all, all the Instagram followers started pouring in at an almost alarming rate. “It still amazes me to this day,” Ryding says. “People are still discovering the series.”

Season 2 will undoubtedly reignite the hype surrounding Young Royals (although it has, incredibly, barely subsided). We meet our favorite characters as they return to the fictional boarding school Hillerska in the aftermath of last season's events. Wilhelm and his love interest Simon (Rudberg), navigate their "breakup" while the prince seeks revenge on his own cousin, the arrogant antagonist August (confidently played by Malte Gårdinger). Drama, outbursts and spoof party scenes are promised.

In the meantime, Ryding and his co-stars – Rudberg, Nikita Uggla, Gårdinger and Frida Argento – have had time to digest the madness that this experience has brought with it. It has been a strange year, where the actors have gone from ordinary teenagers to regularly walking Sweden's red carpets. And everything from brand sponsorship to modeling jobs. Covers of international fashion magazines and fancy dinners. In the background, there have also been high school studies (Ryding) and summer jobs (Uggla and Argento).

The success story began, as so often the path to stardom does, 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 was walking in the wrong direction.” He arrived five minutes late for his audition, sweaty and stressed. Rudberg already had experience in the spotlight; he became famous at the age of 14 as a member of the One Direction-like boy band FO&O, and is currently enjoying a thriving solo career. Acting, on the other hand, was something completely new, which added an extra layer of nervousness.

And there Ryding was already sitting in the audition room. “We didn’t even have time to say hello,” says Rudberg. “I just sat down next to him and we started.” At 18, Ryding had more audition experience than most; he had been regularly appearing in Swedish films and TV series since the age of six.

“I remember him laying on my legs and looking up at me, and I started touching his hair,” Rudberg says. “I remember thinking, ‘Damn, this guy is really good.’” From that moment on, he felt like “this is going to be us.”

Rudberg was hardly the only actor to audition for the role. Even Gårdinger, who eventually got the role of August, Wilhelm’s mean cousin, initially set his sights on the character Simon (“I’m quite tall, so that wouldn’t have worked,” says Gårdinger). Rydinger met “a number of Simons” during his audition process. “It was weird,” he says. “I think one of them got a job as an extra.” But Ryding agrees that he and Rudberg “clicked” from the start.

After their Young Royals audition, Rudberg sent Ryding a DM asking if they could meet up for coffee. “I immediately wanted to be friends with him,” says Rudberg. They stayed in touch. Ryding was at T-Centralen in Stockholm when he received the call that he had been cast as Wilhelm. “I just felt, ‘Oh my God, yes! Finally!’” he recalls. A month later, Rudberg was offered the role of Simon.

“It was obviously the first time I saw them together during the casting process,” says Rojda Sekersöz, who directed several episodes of the first season. “I don’t think chemistry is something magical that just appears out of nowhere. It only shows up when you’re brave enough to open yourself up emotionally to someone else, and that person does the same, and you’re holding hands and dancing together.”

Fans seemed to have a similar feeling. The response to – or rather, the obsession with – Ryding and Rudberg’s on-screen romance is central to Young Royal’s incredible success. It’s an obsession that’s supported by their blossoming friendship outside of work, which is occasionally glimpsed on social media. As season two approaches, they each have nearly two million followers on Instagram.

Not since the Norwegian Skam from 2015 has a Scandinavian youth series – and its budding stars – had such a global impact. And while Skam was an international phenomenon, it was also relatively difficult to watch outside of Norway. Local superfans painstakingly added English subtitles to each episode, before the translated content became available for not-quite-legal download. Young Royals has, in addition to being well-written, beautifully acted and fantastically visual, also been backed by Netflix. In November, season two will be released globally on the streaming platform to 221 million users in over 190 countries.

While the newfound stardom of the lead actors has been the most extreme, the experience is shared by the other Young Royals actors. “When the Instagram followers started rolling in, I didn’t look at my Instagram that much,” says Uggla. “It was pretty scary at first.” The 21-year-old actress who plays Felice, the upper-class girl with a heart of gold, almost missed out on the chance to audition. The casting department had sent instructions for the video application to her old email. In the end, they called instead. “Luckily, I still had the same number,” she says.

Soon after, Uggla boarded the train from her small hometown in Skåne to a one-on-one audition in Stockholm. Although she wasn’t what series creator and head writer Lisa Ambjörn had envisioned as Felice, the young actress turned out to be a positive surprise. “We struggled to find the perfect actress for the role,” says Ambjörn. “Nikita came in with a calm and comfortable demeanor, which refreshingly underscored Felice’s insecurities and problems.”

Although she now lives in Stockholm, Uggla was back in Skåne, working as a waitress, when season one was released. It was her older brothers who kept track of their sister's growing fame. "I saw my siblings writing in the family group chat, 'Oh my God, you have almost 20,000 followers,'" says Uggla. "No, wait, it's going up. Now you have 80,000."

It was strange at first, trying to figure out if people were staring because they recognized her from the series or because she was “doing something weird.” But eventually, Uggla got used to her new reality. She soon started making TikToks where she interacts directly with fans, working with sponsors for select brands (including sustainable shoe brand Toms), and even walked a fashion show during Copenhagen Fashion Week. “It was an experience I could never have imagined,” she says of her runway debut. “Walking the runway in a fashion show? It was completely surreal for me.”

For Uggla, her goals go beyond just having fun with (and making money from) her big break. Growing up, she didn’t have many role models she could relate to. “Beyoncé and Rihanna were the only two black women I saw on TV,” she says (coincidentally, Rihanna has also been Rudberg’s role model for a long time). “I want to be someone people can look up to.” She often speaks openly about self-confidence, self-love, and body positivity on her platforms. “To be honest, I don’t look like most influencers on social media,” she says. “I just want fans to be able to see different types of women.”

On set, Uggla has found a best friend in Frida Argento, who plays Simon's introverted sister, Sara. Their relationship took off, not unlike their friendship in the first season, as they both like horses. In the series, Sara and Felice unexpectedly become friends as the former, who works in the boarding school stables, teaches the latter to ride. "We practiced ourselves sometimes, with the horses," says Argento. "That's when we really clicked." Uggla remembers venting about an upcoming breakup with her then-boyfriend in the car to and from riding practice. Today, Uggla has a picture of the duo as the wallpaper on her iPhone.

Argento came on board late, after the actor who was supposed to play Sara dropped out during pre-production. She’s quick to point out that while Young Royals has changed her life, she doesn’t live a luxurious Hollywood life. “I saw a website that said I had money that was like a million dollars,” she says, laughing at the absurdity of it. Although she does attend the occasional fashion show (usually with Uggla), she often avoids anything that isn’t related to her profession. “I love acting, but I don’t like being the center of attention,” she says, adding that the first wave of Instagram followers made her “scared as hell.”

“In the beginning, it was cool to get things for free,” Argento admits. “You got paid to post and stuff. But eventually I got nervous and didn’t like it, because it felt so fake.” She doesn’t judge others for taking advantage of those kinds of opportunities—she does it herself, occasionally. In between seasons, she worked at a pizzeria.

If Argento is somewhat uninterested in the celebrity, Gårdinger, whose father Pontus Gårdinger is a well-known actor and TV host, is even less interested. When the first season came out, he was in the countryside, so he “didn’t really understand the hype.” “I saw the followers and thought, ‘Oh, okay, that was unexpected, but I’ll buy it,’” he says. When he got back to Stockholm, however, everything got “a little weird.” “In the beginning, I was more nervous than the people who came up to me.”

Now, Young Royals fans know that Gårdinger, 22, is as far from the often obnoxious high school student he plays in the series as you can get. “I thought everyone was going to hate me when the series came out,” he says. “But they saw the differences pretty quickly.” The word his co-stars affectionately use for him is “weird.” “He’s like a cute little bunny,” says Rudberg. Gårdinger is “not an Instagram guy.” He doesn’t check his DMs—and barely even his email.

Ryding says he’s also taking a break from social media. “I’m really affected,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be negative, I just realized it takes up a lot of my time.” As the youngest of the cast, Ryding spends his time between filming periods in high school. His experiences mirror Prince Wilhelm’s, as Ryding immediately felt everyone’s eyes on him. “It was pretty meta,” he says. “It was a little hard to deal with—because school was supposed to be my free zone.”

But there are advantages, of course. The first time I met Ryding and Rudberg was at a Prada dinner in Stockholm about a year ago. The hype from the show’s first season was at its peak, and they were both enjoying the success. I’ve run into them a few times since then, sometimes together, sometimes not—at a Cartier party, a VMAN dinner, at the Cannes Film Festival. A year later, neither of them shy away from the spotlight—they’re going to be in Vogue after all—and they’ve learned to set boundaries and navigate the craziness a little better. “Omar has taught me a lot about the right to say no,” says Ryding.

And when they need that extra boost, they have each other. “We’ve become so close. We were all going through the exact same thing when everything exploded and we started getting recognized,” Argento says. “It would have been hard to experience it all by ourselves.” When Uggla meets with her co-stars, she always checks in on them “for real.” She asks, “How are you?” And then, “But how are you really?”

The dynamic and camaraderie between the actors is confirmed by the series' creators. "Even though everything hasn't been smooth sailing – these aren't relationships, and filming was very stressful – I think there's a genuine caring between them that has made them very close behind the camera," says Ambjörn, noting that they manage to be "kind and playful with each other the whole way through." "For me, it's genuinely magical and beautiful."

I join Ryding and Rudberg, who are sitting apart from the group, eating the photo-friendly lunch prepared for the shoot, and sit down with them. I say that I want to hear how everything is, for the sake of the fans. “For the last time, we are not a couple,” jokes Rudberg. Despite that, they are constantly in touch via text, phone and occasional Snapchats (most recently a spontaneous Snap of a squirrel from Rudberg). They text to ask what the other is wearing to an event, or how long they plan to be there. Everyday things, really.

There's only been one downside to their closeness. It came to light during the filming of Young Royals season 2, when they were filming their romantic scenes (which are basically all the scenes the duo have together). "We were supposed to do some dramatic scenes, and it didn't work out," Ryding says. "At first, we just laughed."

What do they admire most about each other? “You exude confidence,” Ryding tells Rudberg. “And you trust yourself and stand up for your opinions, no matter what.” Rudberg admires Ryding’s “work philosophy.” “You really work hard,” he says.

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

If anyone on the team is most prepared and open to embracing the hype, it’s Rudberg. Miraculously, he’s still unreasonably cute, despite a burgeoning music career and a leading role in a major Netflix series. He enjoys everything about the success—the followers, the increased attention to his music, the fashion. “I’m sitting here wearing Louis Vuitton,” he says. “It’s crazy.”