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.
Julie Miller
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