Elizabeth Debicki has opened up about the “unique challenge” of playing Princess Diana in the final days of her life on The Crown’s new season.
The Australian actor returns to play the late Princess of Wales as Netflix’s royal drama comes to an end. The final season will be split into two parts, the first of which arrives on 16 November.
Princess Diana’s death will be covered “sensitively” in season six, which will also include the marriage between the now-King Charles III and Queen Camilla.
Speaking to The Mirror ahead of the show’s return, Debicki, 33, said that she had stuck closely to writer Peter Morgan’s “emotional blueprint” for Diana.
“I think it’s a unique challenge as an actor, to portray those days,” she said. “It’s his interpretation and it made emotional sense to me, so I clung to that. Because, obviously, it’s devastating and it’s fraught and we can never know.”
The Great Gatsby star is the second actor to take on the role of Princess Diana, having taken over the role from Emma Corrin who played the royal in season four.
Last year, while filming the season, Debicki defended The Crown from critics who questioned the inclusion of Diana’s death in the show.
“I’ll say that Peter and the entire crew of this job do their utmost to really handle everything with such sensitivity and truth and complexity, as do actors,” she said.
Debicki as Diana in ‘The Crown'— (Daniel Escale/Netflix)
“The amount of research and care and conversations and dialogue that happen over, from a viewer’s perspective, something probably that you would never ever notice is just immense. From that very first meeting [with] Peter, I knew that I’d entered into this space where this was taken seriously [in] a deeply caring way. So that’s my experience of the show.”
Debicki’s Diana is joined by Dominic West as Prince Charles, while Imelda Staunton and Jonathan Pryce play the late Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip respectively.
All three versions of the monarch (Staunton, Olivia Colman, Claire Foy) will appear as a “tribute to the late Queen” in the final season of The Crown.
As the series moves into the 21st century, it will also focus on the romance between Prince William and Kate Middleton (newcomers Ed McVey and Meg Bellamy) at university.
Speaking in August, executive producer Suzanne Mackie assured viewers that Diana’s death in 1997 would be handled with care by the show.
“The show might be big and noisy, but we’re not. We’re thoughtful people and we’re sensitive people,” she said.
“And so there was a very, very careful, long, long, long conversation about how we do it – and I hope, you know, the audience will judge it in the end, but I think it’s been delicately, thoughtfully recreated.”
