Helena Bonham Carter, who is set to play the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret in the third and fourth seasons of the Netflix series The Crown has revealed she has a particularly unique connection to the royal. 

When speaking to British edition of Harper’s Bazaar, Bonham Carter says her uncle Mark once had a relationship with the royal. 

“He was in the Grenadiers, I think, and he guarded Margaret and Elizabeth at Windsor. And then they met, and I think there was a romance. He was really dashing..,” she said. 

During a conversation at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, the actress noted she has photographs of the couple together. 

While they didn’t last together as a couple, as Princess Margaret would go on to marry and then divorce Antony Armstrong Jones, the royal and her uncle maintained a close relationship. 

Princess Margaret with Mark Bonham carter at the February 1954 premiere of Kiss Me Kate.

“[They] remained good friends,” she said, per The Sun. “It’s weird, I basically went out with my uncle.”

Bonham Carter has proven to be a dedicated actress, and opened up about her unique methods to prepare for her role on The Crown. 

The actress admitted she communicated with Princess Margaret from beyond the grave through a psychic, as well as using more traditional methods by speaking to several of the late royal’s ladies-in-waiting, and her hairdresser. 

“They spent hours talking about her, mainly because they loved her,” Bonham Carter said. “They felt very strongly that a whole chunk of her character had never been recorded.”

An interesting quirk about the royal was she preferred her lipstick angled a certain way to coat both her lips in one swipe. 

“The less effort, the better, which is very high-status,” Bonham Carter said. “And she always wore a corset because she felt vulnerable, it was her emotional armour—she said of herself that her confidence was enamel-thin.”

All 10 episodes of The Crown’s third season drop on Netflix November 17. Watch the trailer up top.