When The Crown’s second season debuts on December 8, Princess Margaret (played by Vanessa Kirby) will be nursing the epic heartbreak of her broken engagement, to Captain Peter Townsend, through clouds of chain smoke and nasty hangovers. Soon enough, though, the self-destructive royal will meet a character who electrifies her palace-bound life: photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, played by Matthew Goode.

In character portraits shared exclusively with Vanity Fair for a 24-hour window, Kirby and Goode channel the late princess and photographer, whose chemistry is instantaneous in the series, much as it was in real life.

“Each was a person of extraordinary sexual magnetism, with a libido to match,” Armstrong-Jones biographer Anne de Courcy wrote of the couple in a memoir, excerpted by Vanity Fair. “When they entered each other’s force field of attraction, their mutual gravitational pull was irresistible, and soon they were sexually besotted. That their passionate love affair was completely secret added to its intensity.”

Though Margaret and Antony had much in common—including resentment for authority and rebellious streaks—their outsized egos would eventually cause the relationship to implode.

Earlier this year, The Crown creator Peter Morgan told Vanity Fair that Margaret would not only find a rebound romance in the drama’s second season.

“She finds love and pain. I promise you, it’s properly painful,” Morgan said. “Properly painful.”

“He had excessive charisma,” Morgan said of Armstrong-Jones, explaining that the photographer had a tendency to exact “excessive random cruelty on those close to him, and be very libidinous. He is an interesting character because he had polio as a child. When you’ve had polio as a child and when you’ve been slightly rejected by your mother for being the defective child . . . it’s very conspicuous, the compensation that he made by marrying the second-most-high-ranking social woman in the country. It’s like, ‘Notice me, mummy.’”

Though the ill-fated romance makes for more broken hearts, Morgan promised that viewers will be pleased by the second-season dramatics and acting.

“Vanessa explodes this season,” Morgan teased. “We always knew she was a great actress, but she explodes. It’s a very identifiable tragedy, to have someone in the family with more apparent charisma and yet no use for it . . . I love writing her.”

To read more about The Crown’s second season—and its most explosive plotlines—click here.