How Elizabeth Debicki Tackled Playing Princess Diana, the Role That ‘Scared the Hell’ Out of Her
Whenever Elizabeth Debicki talks about playing Princess Diana in Netflix’s “The Crown,” she inevitably circles back to something that the series’ creator, Peter Morgan, has said: If she had not been interested in the part, he would have had to write the show differently, with the People’s Princess taking up significantly less screen time. “I’ve heard him say this a few times at panels and things, and I always think, Is that true?” she said. “It’s the complete opposite to me. I think, How did you know that I could do that? How did you trust me so much with such a huge part?”
The spark of royal magnetism that Morgan sensed in Debicki proved perspicacious. Debicki took over the role from Emma Corrin and debuted her interpretation of the princess in Season 5, which dramatizes the breakdown of the royal marriage to Prince Charles in the early 1990s, and was showered with praise for how uncannily she captured Diana. The soft voice and aristocratic diction, the diffident head tilt and habit of gazing upward through her lashes, the elegance and warmth — it was all there in an indelible performance that earned Debicki her first Emmy nomination, for supporting actress in a drama series, in 2023. It also won her a SAG Award earlier this year.
Her turn in Season 6, which chronicles the last months of Diana’s life before she died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, was just as warmly received. Many reviews even singled it out as the best part of the entire final season. (It’s not by chance that her face has dominated Netflix promotional posters for the past year.) Naturally, the performance earned Debicki another Emmy nomination — one of 18 that “The Crown” racked up for its final chapter.
“The amount of people who’ve been recognized this year from the show just feels really lovely,” the actress said during a Zoom call a few days after the nominations were announced in July. (She was calling from Maine, where she was vacationing, and had just come in from a morning swim in the Atlantic.) “It’s been a long run of six seasons, and it feels like a nice wrapping up of a huge chapter for people and for myself, certainly. It’s a lovely feeling — a peaceful feeling, if that makes sense.”
Debicki’s nomination puts a triumphant end point to a role that occupied several years of her life and was in many ways the hardest of her career, which took off with a flourish in 2013 when she played Jordan Baker in Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby.” Twenty-seven years after the Princess of Wales died while trying to escape an army of paparazzi, she remains a beloved figure, prominent in the minds of people who never knew her personally and those who did, including, of course, her sons Prince William and Prince Harry.
“It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but it did feel a little bit impossible for a while,” Debicki, 33, said. “She’s one of the most famous people that ever lived, and she’s so important to so many people still. So it felt like, how can I do this justice, really? I’m Australian and I was seven when Princess Diana passed away so I didn’t even have the lived memory of it.”
During our two conversations — the first happened a few weeks before the nominations — Debicki gave long, thoughtful answers that reflect just how seriously she took the responsibility of portraying Princess Diana. “I always feel like I ramble so much when I talk about [‘The Crown’] because it’s so unusual, what we did,” she said. “It’s always been difficult to know: How do you express your creative experience of this and be as respectful as humanly possible to the fact that this was a real person who experienced unbelievable tragedy? The trauma of all of this is still so alive for people. It’s not an easy thing to talk about, and you can’t just breeze through it. We certainly didn’t breeze through it when we were making it.
“This job has been a huge, huge privilege to me,” she added. “What would I have done for the last three years if it hadn’t been this?”
Debicki’s almost spookily accurate portrayal of Diana Spencer could only come from someone whose ears were finely tuned to the idiosyncrasies of human speech from birth. Born in Paris to a Polish father and an Australian mother, both of them ballet dancers, she spent her formative years speaking two languages (French in school, English at home) and absorbing a variety of accents and dialects. When she was 5, the family moved to a Melbourne suburb where she had to adjust to life in English full-time. “I can’t imagine what I sounded like,” she said with a laugh. “With my little French accent, I was a bit of an odd feature for some time [at school]. But there was a sweet little bunch of freckly Australian kids who came over and they were like, ‘Do you want to play with us?’”
She remembers a childhood steeped in creativity and imagination: “I would do recitals and concerts and tap dance with little sparkly things on, do “The Nutcracker” or what have you. The joy that used to bring me was so intense. I just felt profoundly alive.” She acted in school plays and community theater (“I could not pay you enough to watch our 1997 rendition of “Oklahoma!” but I was I into it!”), and after high school, she enrolled in the drama program at Melbourne University. She had barely graduated when Luhrmann saw her screen test and cast her in his fizzy take on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel.
The movie opened up a multitude of doors for Debicki who, at 6 foot 3, stood out from the crowd of perennial fresh faces. She shared the stage with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert in a production of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” that went from Sydney to New York, played a glamorous villain in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and in 2016 earned stellar reviews for her turn as an enigmatic American running from her past in AMC’s limited series “The Night Manager,” starring Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston. A supporting turn as a gold-skinned alien priestess in “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” followed. When Steve McQueen’s “Widows” came on her radar, she was “desperate” to land the part of a survivor of domestic violence who plans a heist with Viola Davis and Michelle Rodriguez.
“I sent Steve a tape and then I went to L.A. and auditioned for it. He’s such a fascinating and compassionate human being. He actually called me to give me the part about 45 minutes after I left because he knew that I would be in purgatory,” she said. Making “Widows” was vital to her growth as an actor: “When I think about making that film, I was much, much younger and less trusting in myself. It was so fundamental to me that somebody I so deeply respected stood in front of me and told me that they really felt like I was good at my job.”
It was around this time that Debicki auditioned for a part in the second season of “The Crown” (she won’t say which part). She didn’t get it, but Morgan sent word to her agents that he’d like to discuss her playing Princess Diana in future seasons. Debicki filed the possibility away, never thinking it would actually come to pass. She’d built up a solid body of work by then — and would soon appear in Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” — but she was not yet a big name. Surely there were other actors — British actors — who would be better suited to the part?
Not for Morgan. “Diana, Princess of Wales, was a unique, irreplaceable figure. Truly one of a kind,” he said via email. “It was not just the beauty but the ‘one-of-a- kindness’ of her that made the prospect of casting her so challenging. And one thing one can truly say about Elizabeth Debicki is how unique she is. There is no one else like her. I think the rare quality of ‘individuality’ that Elizabeth possesses is what contributed so significantly to her astonishing portrayal. She is unlike anybody else.”
By 2020, Debicki had thrown herself into the mountain of research materials that the production team had sent to her in Australia, where she was riding out the pandemic. The role terrified her. “I had all my little different books and all my little binders and Post-it notes. And I approached it in a very compartmental- ized, technical way in the beginning,” she said. “And it was about balancing the fear I had of getting something right versus creating something. So that was a bit of a tightrope to walk in the beginning.”
Working with three dialect coaches, she listened over and over to speeches Diana gave, lasering in on the patrician elocution associated with the “Sloane Rangers,” a term used in the 1980s for the denizens of the poshest London neighborhoods. “I realized very quickly that the melody of the voice is very much like learning a piece of music — the cadence, the tone, the way that certain things were emphasized,” Debicki said. “It’s like playing an instrument. If you want to learn how to play the flute, you have to blow into that thing. Even if you sound terrible, you have to keep doing that. So I just locked myself away in my little study and we’d work on Zoom.”
Debicki looked to Corrin’s acclaimed Season 4 performance of twentysomething Diana as a “blueprint” for building her own version of the character. “I always knew what I wanted to do with this part. I knew what I needed to give the audience — and that felt kind of meta,” Debicki said. “It felt like a deep offering of all the things that we collectively knew she was, needed her to be for us, all the things you love about her. These snatches of joy and playfulness — and that golden, luminous light that seemed to always come off her and how much she loved the people in her life.
“And then I had the feeling going into Season 6 as if I’d gotten away with it and I got to try it again, with more confidence in myself and with a really beautiful and steady scene partner.”
That would be Khalid Abdalla, the British actor known for “The Kite Runner” and “The Square” who plays Dodi Fayed, the son of a billionaire who became Diana’s boyfriend in the last months of her life. In the first three episodes of the final season, we follow the princess and her sons (played by Rufus Kampa and Fflyn Edwards) as they vacation on Dodi’s father’s yacht, spraying each other with water guns as they jump into the Mediterranean and giggling as they watch “Jumanji.” These moments are soaked in a gorgeous, sun-drenched contentment that is overshadowed by what we all know is coming as Diana and Dodi make one decision after another that lead them to their tragic end in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel.
Pushing aside the weight of that dread while shooting was a challenge for Debicki. “As an actor, playing the scenes, I was just playing very, very real time, moment to moment,” she said. “I may have done that even more than I’ve ever done before because it was so important to me that you never get a sense that the characters understand where they’re going. The wave of grief always hit us post-making the scene. The character never experienced it.”
Particularly taxing was re-creating the now iconic security camera footage of the couple waiting in the service corridor of the Ritz Hotel before entering the car that would crash moments later. “We had to lift ourselves so above the impending story beat and give them a bliss of lack of awareness,” Debicki said. “So that was really difficult because you can’t totally shut out your knowledge of the thing.
“Khalid and I played that scene for a few hours. We were staying in a country hotel somewhere in England on location, and we ended up having this quiet dinner in an empty hotel. That gave us time to feel things we couldn’t feel when we’re making the scene. We always had each other to help through the wobble that would inevitably come after.”
After shooting wrapped, it took Debicki months to let go of Diana, both emotionally and physically. During our conversations, she spoke in her natural Australian accent and, in her chic black eyeglasses, blond hair flowing over her shoulders, she looked nothing like the Princess of Wales. Yet still today, a trace of Diana was holding on. Just recently, the actress had seen a massage therapist to help her work out some lingering musculoskeletal pain caused from changing her posture for the role. “If you play the character for two years, it does become quite ingrained in the body,” she said.
Professionally, she’s been venturing in the opposite direction of the seriousness of “The Crown,” feeling drawn to projects infused with dark humor, like the recent release “MaXXXine,” Ti West’s bonkers psychosexual thriller in which she plays a Teflon-tough director of horror films. And for now, she’s focusing on finding purely fictional characters to play. “After doing something that’s so crystallinely real but not real, which is what ‘The Crown’ was, I need to do work where the characters are created, they’re just completely imaginative and fictional and I can take a lot of license with them. That feels like the right antithesis.”
She has already signed on to star in Brazilian filmmaker Iuli Gerbase’s sci-fi drama “This Blue Is Mine,” in which she’ll play a peculiar woman who disrupts a family’s tropical resort vacation. She has other potential projects cooking, including a return to the theater. Reflecting on “The Crown” now, she knows the experience has boosted her nerve. “When you can’t wriggle out of something that scares the hell out of you, when there’s nowhere to go but back to work, you really learn how to do your job,” she said. “Because I did something that scared me so much, that’s probably made me braver. It’s really uncomfortable. And also the greatest thing that can happen.”
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Drama series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Read more from the Down to the Wire Drama series issue here.
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