Tag: series the crown season six

After popping up briefly in this season of The Crown, supermodel Cindy Crawford reshared an old throwback photo on Instagram with none other than Princess Diana.

In part two of the sixth season, episode 5, “Willsmania,” Prince William (Ed McVey) returns to his dorm room at Eton to find that his grandfather, Prince Phillip (Jonathan Pryce), had paid a surprise visit. Prince Phillip takes a look at William’s postered walls and, in an attempt to bond with his grandson, asks the prince who the the models in the poster are. Prince William responds that they’re Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, and Cindy Crawford. “In my day, it was Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, and Lana Turner,” Phillip replies.

Though it’s a relatively small moment on the show, it made a big impact on Crawford, who shared a photo with William’s mother, Princess Diana, taken at Kensington Palace. Crawford originally posted the image on August 31, 2017, the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s fatal car accident. “Remembering this inspiring woman today,” the caption from 2017 reads. “This photo was taken at Kensington Palace. Princess Diana had somehow got the number to my office and called herself to ask for me.” 

She continues: “My assistant was in shock! We finally connected and she asked if the next time I was in London I would come by for tea—I think Prince William was just starting to notice models and she thought it would be a cute surprise for him and Prince Harry,” she continued. “I was nervous and didn’t know what to wear, but remember as soon as she came into the room and we started talking, it was like talking to a girlfriend. She was a class act and showed us all what a modern day princess should be. Rest In Peace.”

Six years later, Crawford has re-shared the image with a nod to her “little cameo” on The Crown.  “I still vividly remember visiting Kensington Palace to meet Diana and a teenage William (who had just discovered the “Super Models”) ♥️,” Crawford wrote on her Instagram story. Even supermodels were excited to be in Princess Diana’s presence.

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Having been born into the white-hot center of the modern British monarchy, princes William and Harry have arguably been documented more prolifically and publicly than any other humans on the planet. This resonated with Ed McVey and Luther Ford, particularly after The Crown cast them to play the brothers in the series’ final episodes—and Netflix presented each actor with robust research packets chronicling the princes’ lives.

“At first it was quite overwhelming, because there’s been so much media surrounding them from birth,” says Ford of being cast as the younger son of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. “They were born into a contractual obligation with the press.”

It might have been hard to summon the sibling bond that comes from sharing such a rare experience. But McVey and Ford quickly forged their own brotherhood as a pair of unknown actors cast in two of the most anticipated roles on an unusually expensive, award-winning series that’s been viewed by at least 73 million people worldwide since it first aired in 2016.

“It’s scary going onto a set like that,” Ford tells VF on a recent Zoom, recalling the intimidating scale and an ensemble cast that includes Imelda Staunton, Jonathan Pryce, and Dominic West. Unlike most of their costars, McVey had never appeared onscreen—though he did study at drama school and perform onstage—and Ford had no previous acting credits. 

Ford, who auditioned after his brother’s girlfriend saw a casting notice for The Crown on social media, recalls the first day that he and McVey filmed on the series. Their initial scene was shot at the series’ most royal location: Lancaster House, the 19th-century mansion neighboring Clarence House and St. James’s Palace that’s just a five-minute walk from Buckingham Palace. As if the location were not intimidating enough, the actors were performing a heated sibling conversation in front of about 60 supporting artists including Staunton, Price, and West—all of whom, for audio reasons, were miming conversations in the background.

“Essentially the first day was them watching us do a scene, which was insane,” says Ford, calling it “the most pressurized position to put us in.” He adds with a laugh, “We could have just started with some shots of us walking.”

Then came a scene that Ford describes as “so much worse”—a whispered conversation that William and Harry have in between singing hymns at the Queen Mother’s funeral. Again, he says he and McVey had to sing along to music that only they were hearing through earpieces while about 400 supporting artists inside a cathedral silently bore witness.

“We were singing a cappella in front of the main cast. When your only aim is naturalism, and you’re doing something completely unnatural, it just feels wrong,” says Ford, noting that the finished scene thankfully “doesn’t reflect the pain” of filming.

Ford and McVey had gotten together before production began—taking walks, talking about their characters at the pub. But it was the shared surreality of joining a celebrated ensemble series in its final season that sealed their camaraderie.

“The experience of going through it together bonded us,” says Ford, before delivering a line that could accurately describe William and Harry’s relationship as well. “The situation felt so extreme that it was like, ‘Well, you are the only person in my position, and I’m the only person who’s in your position. So we’re bonded.’” In a separate conversation, McVey confirms that they gelled quickly: “If we didn’t like each other and were just on polite terms, the experience would not have been as good.”

There were Spare revelations that the series ignored too. The memoir debuted midway through filming the final season, so production was well underway when Harry’s bombshells dropped. Sulzberger recalls that the team was filming scenes set at Princess Diana’s funeral inside Westminster Abbey when they got ahold of the book, and one such detail—specifically, that Harry did not cry at his mother’s funeral—went ignored. (In the book, Harry claims he only cried about his mother’s death once, at her burial.)

“We were already filming, and the director was like, our young actor [Fflyn Edwards] is weeping—so sad,” she recalls, noting that the series includes a shot of a young Harry crying. “You just have to say, ‘Okay, that’s a directorial decision.’”

Sulzberger notes that memoirs can be tricky when it comes to fact-checking, so she was not particularly precious about hewing to Spare.

“Whether or not Harry is remembering that moment exactly as it was, or he’s an older man remembering that he had to bottle things up,” she says, “it’s hard to use those details exactly as he explored them.” As a researcher, Sulzberger says she takes autobiographies and memoirs with a grain of salt: “They provide you with their personal perspective and intimate detail, but you have to also understand that it is a single-perspective work.” With Spare, Sulzberger points out “that it was written by a 38-year-old man [partially] about his years as a child. So those memories—especially of the bits we were interested in—may not be as pure as they would’ve been if he had been asked to write down in the moment a diary entry of what happened that day.”

One memoir element that is echoed in The Crown’s final season is the double standard with which Buckingham Palace operated in terms of protecting the Wales siblings from the press. In the final episodes, William begins university at St. Andrews after the palace has struck up a press deal to help give the future heir privacy in his days as a student. Meanwhile, Harry’s use of marijuana as a teenager becomes front-page news. In Spare, the actual prince remembered the moment he discovered the palace was okay with this media narrative after a front-page headline screamed “Harry’s Drugs Shame” in 2002 when he was about 18. 

Surely, I said, Pa will do something. Stop [the editor] […] Pa’s office had decided on…a different approach. Rather than telling the editor to call off the dogs, the Palace was opting to play ball with her. They were going full Neville Chamberlain. […] No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled son.

Princess Diana’s impending death looms over the first three episodes of The Crown’s sixth and final season, which creep through the weeks leading up to her fatal car crash in Paris. There’s her controversial trip to St.-Tropez with Prince William and Prince Harry; her continuing cat and mouse game with press; her final vacation with fling Dodi Fayed; and her frightening car chases with frenzied paparazzi.

“There are so many layers to shooting a season like this,” says Elizabeth Debicki, who brought Diana to eerie life in season five, and who reimagines her last moments in season six. “The interpretation [of Diana’s final weeks] carries a historical weight that is very real for many people, but you’re doing an imagining of it,” she says, referencing series mastermind Peter Morgan, who has written every episode of the drama’s six seasons. “That complexity led me, as an actor, to go really into the micro moments.”

The Australian actor explains that she chose to “play against an ending that was this inevitable tragedy.” She portrayed Diana across seven years of her life and says that her research of the royal led her to “seek out moments where there was this joy, this confidence, this sense of freedom” to Diana. 

Part of the tragedy of the real-life Diana’s death is that, at the age of 36, the princess was finally hitting her stride after years of insecurity. But then again, says Debicki, “there was a massive evolution in so many areas of her life” in those final months.

Ahead, Debicki walks VF through filming the princess’s last days—discussing Diana’s leopard-print PR revenge, her uncertainty playing “ghost Diana,” and what she was thinking while filming the late royal’s final moments.

Vanity Fair: What evolutions did you see in Diana between The Crown’s fifth and sixth seasons?

Elizabeth Debicki: One of them was a sense of, what are her priorities now? What does life look like now that she is not an HRH inside the royal family? What does that mean in terms of how she can relate to people and move through the world? And also obviously the humanitarian work that ended up happening off the back of the divorce. Suddenly she seemed to be more free, albeit she faced lots of backlash to these really courageous decisions about doubling down on her humanitarian work. There’s a confidence…the choices that are being made seem to be coming from a genuine and slightly freer place inside of her.

There were complications and contradictions in her decisions too, especially in terms of her relationship with the press and her decision to go on vacation with a controversial figure like Mohamed Al Fayed.

The first episode of this season [which chronicles Diana’s trip to St.-Tropez with William, Harry, and the Fayeds], for me, was about Diana being a mother and wanting her kids to have a nice vacation. That’s what I play. It’s a very simple thing to want, but in this circumstance, for her, an extremely complicated thing to obtain. There’s press, there’s media attention, there’s people judging the decisions made or not made to go on a vacation with Al Fayed. 

That’s what I mean by narrowing it down to the really micro moments and then playing against the end. It was important for me to show the audience that there were moments of real joy and lightness in those last weeks. That’s also who I learned her to be throughout so much of her life. There was this real commitment to create those moments of joy and levity for her children, amongst so many other complicated factors.