Cheering his country on from the stands at the football World Cup. Giving passionate speeches about the environment. Marrying a middle-class, non-royal 'Kate Middleton lookalike'.
The parallels between Prince Frederik of Denmark, 55, and his British counterpart Prince William, 41, might be striking, in many ways — but it's the similarities between his upbringing and that of William's younger brother Prince Harry that have been doing the rounds since his mother, the Danish Queen Margrethe II, announced her abdication from the throne on new year's eve.
A rebellious upbringing, expeditions across Mongolia and Greenland and being spotted among the ravers at Burning Man festival are among the anecdotes the former military 'daredevil' and long-time bachelor became known for during the years before his announcement as Denmark's future king.
The baby-faced soon-to-be monarch and father-of-four has long been known for his so-called 'party prince' years (he was refused entry to a bar in Brisbane as recently as 2017, because he didn't have ID) and it's this rebellious, down-to-earth streak that seems to have won him favour with the Danish public. According to latest polls, 84 per cent of the Danish public were in favour of their incoming king in the days before his succession was announced — 20 per cent more than those who backed King Charles around the time of his coronation last year.
Frederik's straight-talking, 'woke' persona could have something to do with it. Much like Prince Harry, the Danish heir has long spoken of wanting to be “myself, a human being”, even once he takes to the throne. He attended Harvard using a fake name in a bid to have as normal a university existence as possible, and introduced himself to his future wife Mary, 51 — a tall, glamorous Scottish-Australian real estate executive — as 'Fred' when they first met in a bar in Sydney when he was in town for the 2000 Olympics.
She has since claimed she had no idea he was heir to the Danish throne. “The first time we met, we shook hands,” she once told an interviewer. “I didn’t know he was the prince of Denmark. Half an hour later someone came up to me and said: ‘Do you know who these people are?’”
So what else do we know about Denmark's future king? How did he woo his wife, exactly? And how will his upcoming ascension mark a step-change for Europe and the Danish people?
Politics, nightclubs and the military
The cause of Frederik's rebellious streak has long been the subject of speculation, but it's likely he inherited some of it from his mother, Margrethe II, 83, who is currently Europe's longest-serving monarch following the death of Queen Elizabeth II and is known for her chain-smoking habit and flamboyant sense of style.
He was born in Copenhagen in 1968, four years before his mother began her 52 year chapter on the Danish throne. He was the eldest child of Margarethe and her husband, Prince Henrik of Denmark, (his younger brother Prince Joachim of Denmark was born the following year). He was educated at Krebs School, a Copenhagen private school, and later the École des Roches, a boarding school in the French countryside in Normandy often likened to 'hippy' Hampshire boarding school Bedales, where pupils refer to teachers by their first names. He is said to speak English, French and German.
The Prince Harry comparisons began during his teenage years in the Nineties, when Frederik was said to resent his parents for neglecting him while they fulfilled their royal duties. He quickly pursued a life of fast cars and fast living, regularly seen frequenting nightclubs alongside celebrities and appearing visibly distressed by media attention. He broke his collarbone and needed stitches to his head at the age of 20, after a car accident saw him swerving off the road in the south of France and landing in a brook.
That 'party prince' reputation calmed a little when he left school and became the first Danish royal to complete a university education, studying political science at Aarhus University in Denmark. The course involved a year at Harvard, where he enrolled under the pseudonym Frederik Henriksen to avoid the limelight.
Frederik completed a three-month stint with the Danish UN mission in New York in 1994 and obtained his MSc degree in political science the following year. He went onto train in all three military services, starting as a frogman in the Danish navy’s elite amphibious special forces unit and earning the nickname "Pingo" after his wetsuit filled with water and he was forced to waddle like a penguin.
It is around this time that he is believed to have gained not only his confidence, but his two tattoos: a dog shark on his calf and an intricate but obscure Norse design on one of his upper arms.
From 'party prince' to 'sportsman King'
The first clue to Frederik's sporting side came when he was 18 and took part in an expedition to Mongolia. Fourteen years later, he embarked on "Expedition Sirius 2000", a four-month, 2,175-mile skiing challenge in Greenland which saw temperatures fall below 50 degrees Celsius.
Since then he has become the first Danish royal to complete an Iron Man triathlon, and has run marathons in Copenhagen, New York and Paris, finishing with a personal best of three hours, 22 minutes and 50 seconds in Copenhagen. Since 2018 he has organised the Royal Run, an annual running event across the country.
He also skis, supports Arsenal and Liverpool football teams and is a competitive sailor, racing Finn and Dragon boats — earning him the nickname of the “sportsman King” in Denmark. But it hasn't always been plain sailing. Over the years, the future king has been hospitalised following scooter and sledding accidents, and in 2016 he broke his back trampolining with his son.
He is said to have matured out of his party prince persona during his long stint of military training, but did make a surprise appearance at a friend's rock music concert in 2007, treating the crowd to a harmonica solo, and was spotted at Burning Man festival as recently as 2014, reportedly insisting on being called “Hamlet” and dressed in a flower-embroidered kilt, a gold waistcoat, a necklace and a pair of motorcycle goggles. Three years later, the baby-faced future king famously found himself being refused entry to a bar in Brisbane, Australia, because he didn't have ID — despite being 49 years old.
"I don't know if you would call him a party prince today," Marie Rønde, royal correspondent for Danish broadcaster TV2, said. "I think he's changed a lot, but that's what he was at that time."
She says he spent many years feeling unprepared for his role as monarch, but has got used to it over time. "He's talked about it himself that when he turned 18, he was not at all prepared for what came to him at that point,” she continued. "He's used a lot of time getting prepared — like getting used to the fact that this is the task of his life and he's worked a lot on that".
A chance pub encounter with Kate Middleton’s 'royal sister'
Frederik met his Scottish-Australian wife Mary Donaldson in 2000 in a bar in Sydney, while he was visiting for the Olympic Games to support the Danish sailing team. The Tasmanian-raised law graduate was working in luxury real estate when the pair met, and was from a relatively normal, middle-class family.
Her parents worked as a maths professor and an executive assistant and Mary — a tall, dark, glamorous youngest-of-four who was 28 and had been living in Sydney for seven years — was close to her siblings, earning her close comparisons to Kate Middleton when the relationship first emerged.
Frederik was in a pub, the Slip Inn, with his younger brother, Joachim, his cousin Prince Nikolaos of Greece and Denmark, and Princess Martha of Norway when he first met Mary and her friend Beatrice, who didn't realise who they were. According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, the group ended up having an unlikely conversation about chest hair.
“We were allowed to touch Prince Frederik and Prince Nikolaos,” Mary’s friend Beatrice Tarnawski has since said of the meeting. “I liked Prince Frederik best because he was so smooth. Prince Nikolaos had a lot of hair and that really wasn’t my type.”
Mary hasn't spoken of the details of the conversation herself but has said she didn’t know who Frederik was. “The first time we met, we shook hands and I didn’t know he was the crown prince of Denmark,” she once said in an interview. “An hour later someone came up to me and said, 'Do you know who these people are?'"
Frederik — then known for his lively bachelor lifestyle — reportedly introduced himself to Mary as Fred on that first meeting and asked for her number. They kept in touch and reportedly began a secret relationship, him making regular trips to Australia to visit her in the early days.
Their whirlwind romance eventually came to light the following year, in 2001, the same year Mary moved to Denmark after a stint teaching English in Paris.
Two years later, in October 2003, his mother Queen Margrethe gave her consent for the couple to marry. Their wedding took place in Copenhagen Cathedral the following year, her wearing a dress by a Danish designer and carrying Australian flowers in her bouquet.
They went onto have four children: Christian, who turned 18 this year and will be next in line to the throne; Isabella, 16; and twins Vincent and Josephine, both 12. "It's a miracle," Frederik told the crowds as he stood beaming on the steps of Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen after the twins' birth.
Mary's calm, polite demeanor and chic fashion sense has regularly been likened to the Princess of Wales' over the years, the pair even being called 'royal sisters'.
Like Kate Middleton and her husband, the couple regularly engage in charity work — Mary's charity, the Mary Foundation, aims to help the underprivileged, female rights, bullying and social isolation — and are generally viewed as representing modern values, notably sending their four children mainly to state schools in an attempt to give them as normal an upbringing as possible.
Historian Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen describes the couple as “modern, woke, lovers of pop music, modern art and sports”.
Affair rumours and a tactically-timed abdication
Mary has long been popular with the Danish public — a poll just last week found her to be the most popular Danish royal, rated highly by 85 per cent of Danes — so recent rumours of an affair were met with great shock.
Speculation first emerged in October after a Spanish magazine called Lecutras published photos of Frederik walking in a Madrid park with a glamorous blonde Mexican socialite called Genoveva Casanova, claiming they had spent the evening watching flamenco dancing and eating dinner together and that the prince had slept over at Casanova's apartment.
They were seen together alone at 1am at a Tablao Flamenco in Madrid… They then went to her house.
— Willem (@NerumWim) January 2, 2024
Genoveva Casanova is the ex-wife of Cayetano Martínez de Irujo y Fitz-James Stuart, 14th Count of Salvatierra, 4th Duke of Arjona, Grandee of Spain, son of Cayetana Fitz-James… pic.twitter.com/8s7UMyZ2xm
Casanova later issued a statement strongly denying any suggestion of an affair and calling the "malicious" allegations "false and absolutely untrue". A spokesperson for the Danish royal family told the media: “We do not comment on rumors and insinuations", but commentators were quick to comment on Mary's 'frosty' body language towards her husband on a public engagement a few days later.
Frederik and Mary have since put on a united public front, seen holding hands as they walked into church in Copenhagen on Christmas Eve, shortly after returning from a family trip to Australia and New Zealand and just days after she shared a cryptic post about loneliness and the need for human connection during the festive season.
Commentators have been quick to call the subsequent abdication of his mother a 'calculated strategy' to save her son's marriage after the affair rumours. The Queen herself naturally put the decision down to other factors, suggesting in her announcement that it was due to her back surgery in early 2023. "The surgery naturally gave rise to thinking about the future - whether the time had come to leave the responsibility to the next generation," she told the nation in her address. "I have decided that now is the right time."
Whatever the reason, the announcement will make Mary the nation's first Australian-born queen and Frederik the King of Denmark and head of state in the country - which is a constitutional monarchy - as well as in Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Unlike British royal tradition, there will be no formal crowning ceremony; his accession will simply be announced from Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen on the day itself, January 14.
A 'woke' and 'curious' king with a passion for the planet
"I don't want to lock myself in a fortress. I want to be myself, a human being," Frederik once said, insisting he would stick to this promise even after taking the throne and explaining that he and his wife, “don’t just want to be driven around waving nicely to the crowds from a carriage.”
“The bottom line is that we must never stop developing and the royal house must continue to be a meaningful institution that the Danes are proud of and support,” he added. Gitte Redder, the author who interviewed Frederik at the time, called the future king "a star among many Danes" even before he took to the throne, nodding to his various nicknames among the Danish public, from the Frogman King and the Rock ’n’ Roll King to the Sportsman King and the Green King. “By nature he is open-minded, curious and down to earth. With Crown Princess Mary he has already set the agenda on sustainability, medicine and human rights, and the royal couple has ambitions that the monarchy should also be relevant, useful and have value for young generations in the future," she said.
Indeed, like King Charles, the Danish heir has long spoken of his passion for the planet in the years since the Cop15 climate conference took place in his home city of Copenhagen in 2009 - the same year he helped to author the Polartokt Kongelig (Polar Cruise Royal), about the challenges of climate.
He has been involved in multiple international conversations about climate change since then and appeared at the Cop28 climate conference in Dubai last year, as well as a number of other expeditions, forums and events about the environment, vowing to "guide the ship" of Denmark into the future.
Marie Rønde, royal correspondent for Danish broadcaster TV2, believes Frederik will be a true "king of the people" when he officially becomes Frederik X in a couple of weeks. "He meets a lot of Danes when he's out and about and he's very good at talking to them," she says. "[Queen Margrethe] is also a queen of the people, people really like her, but I think he will be too."
So how much of a step-change will his reign be after his mother's 52 years at the helm? Quite a significant one, say commentators. Rønde believes that while Frederik has long played the role of his mother's "wingman", he will make a very different leader. "He's had a long military education and he's fond of rock music, (he) goes to concerts and festivals, and he's very into sports events. So in that way, he's very different from his mother," she explains.
From wingman to the man in charge, then. Could Europe be about to see its most down-to-earth monarch yet?
