“You can see the anger on Prince Harry’s face,” commented one social media user on the “joke.”
Regardless of whether you tend to love or hate a prank, most people agree that attempting such a joke at a wedding is a risky endeavor. Even if you’re the bride’s sibling or the groom’s best friend, injecting some unplanned humor into the newlyweds’ big day may upset them and other guests. However, this fear didn’t seem to stop Prince Harry and Prince William from pulling a prank during the wedding of their father, King Charles III, to Queen Camilla. In the resurfaced video, Harry throws a handful of confetti on top of his father, as William tosses some over his brother’s shoulder. While Camilla stood directly next to her new husband, she seemed to avoid much of the confetti that blanketed him. Yet Charles didn’t seem to mind the harmless prank, as smiles and shakes his head following the surprise bombardment.
While the prank by William and Harry appeared to be lighthearted, many social media users took notice of Harry’s move to dump his confetti atop his father’s head, rather than scattering it around the happy couple. In a clip of the moment posted on TikTok with over eight million views, commenters speculated on Harry’s thoughts during this particular moment. “You can see the anger on prince Harry’s face,” commented one user. “He threw it like ‘this one is for momma,’” added another. Harry’s complicated feelings toward his father’s 2005 marriage to Camila are not unknown. “Despite Willy and me urging him not to, Pa was going ahead,” he wrote in his memoir Spare. “We pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings. We recognized that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he’d always loved.”
However, in other interviews, Harry expressed a deeper resentment for his stepmother. In a conversation with Anderson Cooper, the prince criticized Camilla’s relationship with the media. “There was open willingness on both sides to trade information,” he told Cooper. “And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street.”
However, this wasn’t the first prank one of the brothers pulled off at a royal affair. A few weeks before his wedding to Meghan Markle in 2018, Harry reportedly fell off of a ladder while changing a lightbulb. In a desire to poke fun at his sibling’s recent misfortune, William tied a ladder to the back of the couple’s car in a reference to the fall. Fortunately, William’s younger brother didn’t seem to mind the joke. “Harry and Meghan went about midnight, shattered and madly in love,” an insider told the Daily Mirror in regard to the incident. The rest of the after-party seemingly continued without any additional pranks, albeit it for a slightly-embarrassing story from the groom’s father. “Charles spoke about feeding Harry a bottle and changing his nappy, and then said look how well he turned out,” the insider added. “That’s about as embarrassing as it got.”