In the end, Simon got his prince. Or really, maybe it’s Crown Prince Wilhelm who really won, in yesterday’s finale of Netflix’s wildly popular Swedish series Young Royals. The prince chose freedom and ended up with his man. While Episodes 1 through 5, which dropped a week earlier, had left fans wondering if the star-crossed couple might really be finished, in the closing minutes of Episode 6, as the heir to the throne is pulling away from his boarding school of three years, Hillerska, he turns to his mother, the queen, and says of the crown, “What if I don’t want that?”
The last thing he wants to do is upset her, he insists—the monarch had been sick for much of this season, after all, upping the stakes for the prince—but Wilhelm says he has to be honest, and true to his heart. “This is not about Simon, it’s about this role…We were assigned it, we didn’t choose it. I know you think I’m gonna change my mind, but I’m not. I don’t want this.”
With that, his mother lets him go, and Wilhelm goes running down a country road after a car, eventually into the arms of a long-suffering, but still loving, Simon. A series that since 2021 has often been atypical of teen dramas and opted for the unpredictable came through with a storybook ending. I’m not sure it really had a choice—so beloved is Young Royals around the globe that stans would have likely descended on Netflix offices in Stockholm and beyond if the boys had been left apart.
While Edvin Ryding has excelled as the conflicted young prince, the Hamlet of Hillerska, and the extended cast has been full of gorgeous, moving performances— never more so than in Season 3—the beating heart of Young Royals’ message of liberation and truth-speaking, for queer people and beyond, has been Simon. As embodied by Omar Rudberg, who’s been on stage in one way or another for most of his life, but remarkably had never acted until he landed the role in 2020, Simon is no doubt a heartthrob. But it’s his working-class, immigrant, singer-songwriter’s free spirit that draws the prince the most.
Not unlike his character, Rudberg himself is a musician and unapologetically himself, getting more so by the day. And when he connects with me over Zoom from Los Angeles to talk about Young Royals, his own music, and what’s next, we begin by chatting about one of the greatest be-yourself figures in pop culture history, with whom I have a long history and who Omar saw live for the first time only two nights earlier on her retrospective “Celebration Tour”: Madonna.
“I am just obsessed with not giving a fuck anymore?” Rudberg gushes. “And that’s what I took from her, took from the show. I just think she’s so fucking cool, and brave. And I want to be like she was, and is, like, not giving a damn about what people say, or think? Damn, I’m just obsessed with her.” Amen to that. We’re both taken with the concert’s rendering of “Live To Tell”—a lump-in-the-throat tribute to loved ones lost to AIDS. “It was so beautiful, sad but also beautiful,” Rudberg says. “I was talking to my manager while watching the show. And I was like, ‘But why was she so controversial, though? Like, what did she do? Why did people care so much?’ blah blah blah. And so, the day after, he sent me the link to when she won Woman of the Year at Billboard. And that speech moved me so much—it was so fucking strong. So I’m so obsessed now, like I love Madonna now!”
“Sad,” “strong,” “brave” and “moving” are also adjectives that work for Young Royals’ third and final season. As great and groundbreaking as the first two years at Hillerska were, the drama was taken up a notch for the series’ swan song—and not just between Wille and Simon, but for many of the show’s beautifully nuanced characters. “This last season is so special,” Rudberg says. “And when we got into this whole process of shooting it, and making it come to reality? We all just thought the same thing, which was, we know it’s the last season, and we just want to have fun, have a good time, and enjoy this moment of shooting this beautiful story, the end of this whole journey. And we had a great time. But also the storyline itself is so moving, and when you compare it to the other two, like what like you were saying, you kind of see that people are not just one thing?”
Such revelations were evident in erstwhile “bad boy” August (Målte Gardinger), who began Young Royals as a straight-up villain and evolved into a far more wounded and sympathetic figure; in Sara [Frida Argento], Simon’s sister, who feels like a social outcast after events of the second season, but finds her way back; in the siblings’ long-absent father [Leonard Terfelt] and his struggles with sobriety; and with Felice [Nikita Uggla], popular but dealing with personal betrayals and long-suppressed feelings of being the only Black girl at Hillerska. “It’s kind of like an onion, where you start to see more layers?” Rudberg explains. “That’s special about this season…now you kind of understand people and where they come from, and why they do things.”
At the center of it all, of course, is Wilhelm and Simon—“Wilmon” as the shipping YR fans have come to call them. As queer folks the world over know, often coming out is not a panacea to all your problems, but rather only a first step, especially when two people come from vastly different worlds. After the prince went public about the relationship at the end of Season 2, some might have expected smooth sailing for the couple this time around. Far from it. “That was fun to work with as well,” says Rudberg. “Because now that Simon and Wille actually chose each other, to be with each other? Well, now they start realizing that, wait—they kind of crash, sometimes. Because they are so different and come from totally different families and lives…and because they don’t think alike.”
Repeatedly throughout the third season those differences are underscored. As the palace grudgingly tries to navigate the crown prince having a boyfriend as a public reality, it urges Simon to “keep a low profile” and censor his social media presence, but a song he posts with a potentially inflammatory lyric, and an innocuous-but-not photo taken at a May Day rally prove too much. His free spirit increasingly suffocated, and he finally deletes his socials, though his day one pals, Rosh and Ayub, urge him not to “delete” himself.
A tabloid spotlight now on the school leads to a salacious story that threatens Hillerska’s very existence. Wille tells Simon he could never start a prince’s charity for LGBTQ+ youth, as it would be seen as “too political.” Simon retorts that “to love who you want is a human right.” Simon’s family receives hate mail, and rocks are thrown through their windows. The mounting stress takes its toll on the queen’s health and Wilhelm feels increasingly pressured to step up, while Simon confesses to his mother that though he loves Wille, he feels he can’t do anything right. And in words that should—note to Netflix—be splashed on YR merch right now, she comforts him with: “Love shouldn’t be this hard.”
Last year, in previewing Season 3, Rudberg advised fans to “bring tissues.” He wasn’t kidding. The couple’s troubles all come to an aching, seemingly intractable head in the closing minutes of Episode 5, when during a painfully awkward birthday “party” at the palace attended by only the prince, his parents and Simon, Wilhelm explodes at the queen and duke for their lack of support, trashes his presents and lashes out at Simon. He later apologizes, but Simon has reached a breaking point: “I can’t do this anymore,” he concludes.
They kept us believing it was over halfway through yesterday’s finale. “I never gave up on us,” Simon tells Wille in an apparent goodbye, “I gave up on the royal family.” When all is said and done, the boys make it work. But that’s only, as Young Royals co-creator and executive producer Lisa Ambjörn has pointed out, because they made Wilhelm choose. Turns out, you can’t both be crown prince and have a boyfriend. “What we are saying is, that doesn’t work,” Ambjörn says in Young Royals Forever, an hourlong behind-the-scenes documentary on the filming of Season 3 that dropped along with the finale and was no doubt consumed by fans just as voraciously.
Did Rudberg ever have any doubt that Wilmon would end up together? “Like, maybe during Season 2?” he recalls. “Like when we were farther away from the ending? That’s when I probably thought sometimes, ‘Is it all just gonna be a whole mess, and everybody is gonna be so depressed, and everything is gonna end like shit? What if it actually ends like that?’ But when we got closer to the final season, you know, we talked to Lisa, and I kind of already knew like a year ago, or more, how this all would end up. And I kind of also heard her vision of where she wanted to take the series, and where she wanted to take Simon and Wille. We had such a trust in Lisa, that she was going to make an amazing ending, she wanted the ending and the last season to be so—like a fucking roller coaster, the craziest roller coaster you’ll ever be on. And I just trusted her, and I think it’s perfect.”
Ambjörn’s essential presence comes through in Young Royals Forever—she tears up during the table read for the finale and is a constant, encouraging presence on set, part shepherd, part de facto mother. Off-camera tears are present throughout, particularly as principal cast members shoot their final scenes, but the behind-the-scenes cameras don’t indulge in them, nor do we see too many from Rudberg, but that’s not because they weren’t there. “I’m actually the top five, or top three, most crier, through this whole process?” he admits. “I cry very easily, and I think while shooting, I cried a few times, but they didn’t really take all of those moments in Young Royals Forever.”
In a moment both touching and funny, in between takes on Rudberg and Ryding’s final scene ever [shot out of sequence], a lakeside moment, Rudberg turns to the behind-the-scenes crew and yells, “Do I look fucked up? That’s because I am fucked up!” And in fact, there were way more tears than that. “When I thought we were all done?” he recalls, “I just kind of let everything out. Right after? When I thought we were done shooting that scene? And then I was just hugging Lisa, I was crying like a baby, because I couldn’t tell the difference between Simon’s feelings in front of the camera, and the feelings of myself, off-camera. I couldn’t stop what had built up through the scene and it just kind of flushed out? And it just broke out of me. And then like, thirty seconds later, they were like, ‘Yo, we have to do another take!’ And when they said I had to go back to set I just looked at Lisa and I was just crying, crying. And I was like, ‘Do you see my face? I cannot go back! I cannot do this! I’m a mess!’ And she just took my shoulders and said, ‘You’re gonna do this. Walk with me, you’re gonna do this.’ But when I was crying like that, Lisa actually told the behind-the-scenes team, ‘Do not record this. Go. Go.’”
It’s a safe bet millions of tears were shed in the past week by YR devotees worldwide, but in the end, they’d be tears of joy. Omar has long said that early on, he had a feeling that the series would be big, but admits that the extent of its impact— touching countless queer kids, of course, but also, as Ambjörn points out, older viewers who couldn’t be with the person they loved when they were in school—has exceeded his expectations. “It’s definitely passed what I thought it was gonna be,” Rudberg says.
“I thought it was gonna be big, and beloved? But the level that we’re on right now, and how many people love the series, and what it means to them, I never thought all of this was going to happen. Definitely not. But I just had a feeling in my heart when I read the script for the first time, I was like, ‘Yo. This is—do not play with this thing!’ Like when I read it for the first time? Like, I was obsessed. I was like, ‘This is gonna be something, and I have to be a part of it. And that’s kind of why I went, ‘If I don’t get this part, like, I’m gonna die.’”
“We can be a revolution,” Simon sings early on in Season 3, in a bedroom song that he posts, and which goes viral, much to the dismay of the palace—“revolution” not exactly being a word favored by royals. Admirers, and of course, haters, flood Simon’s comments, creating exactly the kind of controversy royal families don’t want. Later, when all seems lost for the couple, a variation of the line returns, in “Wille’s Song,” a belated birthday gift to the prince from Simon. “We were a revolution,” he sings, “if only for each other.” In a world in which hard-won LGBTQ+ rights in some nations seem in danger of backsliding, to say nothing of myriad places worldwide where real-life Simons and Willes would literally risk their lives by being open, I ask Omar whether in its own way, Young Royals itself wasn’t a revolution?
“Um, I—I think so?” he replies, tentatively. “Wouldn’t that be a good thing? If we were, a sort of…?” Yes, I assure him. It would be. “I really hope that we made something, together, all of us,” he continues. “And I do believe we did, that it touched people. I feel like the series has helped people, and I feel like we’ve helped make a change, even if it’s small, and the world is huge, I feel like it’s at least something? But also, we sing in the series that ‘we were a revolution,’ but the end of the day, being gay, or wanting to love someone shouldn’t be a revolution.”
Omar turned 25 in November, but he’s a young 25—not just in appearance (He’s cut off most of Simon’s signature curls), but in effect. There’s an innocent quality to him and a seeming immense amount of appreciation for everything that has come his way, with Young Royals, and before. Even if he wasn’t the most seasoned actor in the cast when the series began, he was already very much a public figure in Sweden and beyond, thanks to music. As he discussed with V’s Mathias Rosenzweig in 2022, Rudberg spent his early life in Venezuela, moved to Sweden at age six, appeared at age 10 on Talang, the country’s version of Got Talent, and by 14, in 2013, had joined the boyband FO&O, which lasted four years. “You know, we were so big, it was a small One Direction, in Sweden, kind of thing,” he recalls. “And in the Nordics, people went crazy, they saw me in a store and they kind of fainted! And I’m so lucky that I got to be a part of that.” Rudberg launched a solo career in 2018, until he was cast in Young Royals. “And then, I am then a part of Nordic’s biggest and most successful series, where we get fans from all over the world, and it’s a huge thing? I’m just so lucky, again, that I got to be a part of something that is so successful, that means a lot to people, and moves people.”
While he expressed some trepidation about the unknown in Young Royals Forever, those interviews were filmed more than nine months ago, and he’s gotten more clarity on his future in the ensuing months. “I’m just so thankful, and that’s why I’m saying that it is hard to like, change, to go the next chapter?” he explains. “Because it was scary, leaving the band, and doing something new, because it was an amazing journey. And the same thing with Royals, I feel like it was such an amazing journey, and it is scary to go on to the next chapter because you don’t know what’s going to happen! I don’t know what’s going happen.”
What’s going to happen is likely to be centered on Rudberg’s first love, music. In 2022 he released his debut solo album, OMR, through Sweden’s TEN Music, he’s released a string of singles in Spanish, Swedish, and English, and last month he played his first solo show, packing out Stockholm’s 1600-cap venue Cirkus, with a 20-plus song set that began with fan favorite “Mi Casa Su Casa,“ ended with 2021’s “It Takes A Fool To Remain Sane” and included the lovely “Simon’s Song” from Young Royals Season 1. “Best night of my life!” he says. And now, there’s news on the recording front.
“I’m actually about to sign my first record deal with a big American label!” he reveals. Exactly which label and a timetable for releases and touring are still under wraps— he can’t promise he’ll play a U.S. show this year, necessarily, “but in the future!” And during his time in L.A., when not doing Netflix interviews, seeing Madonna, or attending The Oscars (!), he’s been meeting with top-flight writers and producers, including the co-composer of Beyoncé’s chart-topping “Texas Hold ‘Em.” “So, I’m on this journey right now!” Rudberg offers. “Where I’m like, writing with amazing people, and I have an amazing crew behind me? I’m gonna have my new label, together with my Swedish label, and I’m gonna have this huge team. And we’re gonna do this, for real!”
Still, Omar adds, he’s been in the business long enough to know that nothing is given. “I don’t take anything for granted,” he says. “I never took Royals for granted in that it made a huge difference in my life. So that’s why it is gonna be sad to leave Simon. But Simon will always be a part of me, a part of my whole journey. And so I’m kind of getting to the point where I’m—’Okay, let’s go, let’s do this. Next thing.’”
It’s March—a time of year when, for the past three years, Rudberg would have been in pre-production for a new season of Young Royals. Does he regret that right now he’s not gearing up for a Season 4? Turns out—not so much. “You know what? It’s actually okay,” he says. “It actually feels pretty good not to be getting those emails like, ‘Yo, we’re going pick you up at like 5:15! You’re going go to that little castle again!’ It’s like…bro…[laughs] So I’m actually okay, not going back this year. And it feels good, we’re happy, it’s a great ending. We’re still going have fun together, hang out, and we love each other, we’re a family. And it just feels right.”
Omar even adds, in news that should please the YR faithful, that even though Wille and Simon’s story may be over, he and his co-star may be “Ryding” together again. “I can spoil you something, which is that me and Edvin—we’re doing some stuff in the future together, bro!” he shares. “It’s in the works, we are working on something together! And we are still going be really good friends, and colleagues as well, hopefully. So, stay tuned for more! The future holds a lot of fun things.”
A huge Swedish thank you—“Tack”—to all involved with Young Royals, for three seasons of a very special show that won’t soon be forgotten. As Rudberg sings in “Simon’s Song”:
What we had and who we were
I can’t forget all the good we shared
The question’s answer is for sure
That Hillerska will endure
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