Hollywood stars including Olivia Colman perform King Charles’ speeches on the environment
Hollywood stars, including Olivia Colman, will read lines from King Charles’ speeches on the environment spanning more than 50 years.
Ms Colman – who played the Queen in The Crown – will star alongside 18 other actors and environmentalists in a short film released today.
Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson and Idris Elba are also recorded reading the King’s words to mark the launch of a new YouTube channel for his RE:TV website.
A new short film called The King’s Speech, released today, features the landmark speech delivered to the Countryside Steering Committee for Wales on February 19, 1970, when young Prince Charles was just 21.
In the speech – which the king has said people at the time judged as ‘dotty’ and ‘completely potty’ – he predicted the catastrophe of plastic waste, stating: ‘When you consider that each person produces about 2 pounds of waste a day, and there are 55 million of us on this island using disposable bottles and plastic containers, it’s not hard to imagine the mountains of waste we will be dealing with one way or another.’
Hollywood star Olivia Colman – who played the queen in The Crown – will star alongside 18 other actors and environmentalists in a short film released today
In the speech – which the king has said people judged as ‘dotty’ and ‘completely potty’ at the time – he predicted the catastrophe of plastic waste
In a preview clip for the new film, the King’s voice in his opening speech at the 2020 World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, where he met environmental activist Greta Thunberg, warned that: ‘Global warming, climate change and the devastating loss of biodiversity are the greatest threats humanity has ever faced.’
His voice is then split with that of Luther star Idris Elba, who utters the same words today.
The video is interspersed with images of the effects of climate change, including bushfires, floods and drought, and locations such as the greenhouses at Kew Gardens and the ancient woodland at Burnham Beeches.
RE:TV was launched three years ago during Climate Week as a content platform for short films, with Charles as editor-in-chief.
It has produced more than 100 films highlighting innovations in response to the climate and biodiversity crisis.
In 2020, on the 50th anniversary of his first major speech on the environment, Charles said it was met with bewilderment, adding: ‘I was considered rather careless, to say the least, for even suggesting these things, much like when I set up a sewage treatment system with reedbeds in Highgrove – that was considered utterly insane.
“Everything I suggested was apparently completely trivial.”
The Daily Mail has long campaigned against waste with our Turn the Tide on Plastic campaign.
Horticulturist Danny Clarke (pictured: left) has joined a roster of celebrities, including actor Woody Harrelson (pictured: right), to help environmentalists launch a new RE:TV YouTube channel
The preview of the new video also includes the king’s speech at the opening session of the important COP21 conference on climate change in Paris in 2015, in which he said: ‘By damaging our climate, we become the architects of our own destruction.
“While the planet can survive the scorching earth and rising waters, humanity cannot.”
Oscar winner Olivia Colman, star of The Crown, then picks up other key themes from the speech, saying, “We have the knowledge, the tools and the money. We just lack the will.’
BBC gardening presenter Danny Clarke, author Charlie Mackesy, YouTube environmentalist Jack Harries and climate activist Leah Thomas also appear in the video.
At the end of the preview clip for the video, titled The Speeches: 50 Years of Speaking Up For The Planet, the king is shown, from the original RE:TV launch movie in 2020, and concludes, “There is real hope, but we just need to get our act together.”