In the fifth season of “The Crown,” Elizabeth Debicki took over the role of Princess Diana from Emma Corrin, earning an Emmy Award for her performance. In season 6, she returned to the story with the added challenge of playing the People's Princess in the final weeks of her life. Debicki's luminous and sensitive work has been recognized with Golden Globe and Critics Choice awards, and she and the ensemble also earned SAG nominations.
In her two acceptance speeches so far, Debicki thanked her “beautiful imaginary children” (Rufus Kampa as William and Fflyn Edwards as Harry), as well as her scene partner Khalid Abdalla, who played Dodi Fayed. “If I did anything good on this show, you're half of it,” he told her. He also noted that the role was both “a gift” and a “terrifying challenge.”
In a Zoom chat from Paris, Debicki clarifies further. “I found that as I've gotten older, really good things usually come in that fun package. What is good for you is often what is discouraging.” She had said yes to the role immediately, instinctively, “and then a wave of layers of reasoning started to come in, and I found myself feeling like I was at a crossroads, in the sense that it was going to go one of two ways.” “. : You can do it well or not. Either way, it will be polarizing.”
The first four episodes of the final season focus on Diana, her children, her relationship with Fayed, and her tragic end. In Debicki's first scene after the break, she had to sneak into William's room and wake him up to go on vacation. She was grateful for her gentle re-entry. “I felt this strange muscle memory coming back into my body. I was standing in the hallway, someone said, 'Action,' I opened the door with a squeak and feltIt's there, it's just there, and that was lovely. She could improvise those two scenes with the boys when she wakes them up. And they are super kids, really free and fun. I used to feel very helpless when I didn't have them on set.”
His biggest challenge was not letting his character portray what the actor knew. “When I read the scripts, I was devastated. That's the moment I really allow myself to feel it. Then I had to learn to play against it and, in that sense, I had Khalid Abdalla as a scene partner. “We were very strategic and strongly intertwined in our collaboration process in terms of what is important to show, because we came to the story with a lot of prior knowledge, with conceptual ideas of that relationship.”
Princess Diana's (played by Elizabeth Debicki) relationship with Dodi Fayed (played by Khalid Abdalla) was key to season 6.
(Daniel Escala / Netflix)
They focused on staying in the moment. “There is enormous complexity there and questions to which we will never know the answers; It's not our job to know the answers, so we have to look at these photographs, listen to these people tell us things. And we saw that sometimes there was enormous joy and a lot of generosity.” Her character had a clear intention at all times: “Get to the kids, take the phone call, come home.”
She and Abdalla would be back in the makeup truck after filming when the pain of their characters' fate would hit them. “I'd look at him and he'd say, 'Oh, do you feel that?' and I said 'Yes, it's coming,' because we understood what we were putting into the world and we felt like a deep responsibility to do it with the greatest compassion possible.”
Creator Peter Morgan created scenes after Diana's death in which she visits Prince Charles (Dominic West) and later Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton). Debicki and West filmed their scene the day after the group “Crown” celebrated the premiere of season five. “Neither of us really knew how to do it,” he recalls. “Our director, Christian Schwochow, said, 'Let's film this as if it were a conversation.' “We didn’t rehearse it, we just rolled the camera.”
The scene tapped into a universal experience of pain. “You think, 'I need to talk to that person.' I understand what happened, but let me talk to that person.'” The actors' own feelings of grief grew as they worked. “Dom is really beautiful in that season, but particularly all the work on Episode 4, I found some amazingly good acting. Sitting in front of him was so powerful that it actually made me cry.”
After finishing, he made a film with Ti West called “MaXXXine,” “a very different kind of filmmaking, much faster and less reverential in tone.” But she's not sure what comes next. “She's never experienced this kind of journey through a role, and how satisfying it can be,” she says of playing Diana for two seasons. “It was so creatively stimulating that it's a tough act to follow.”
