In “The Crown,” the story of Diana, Princess of Wales, could only end one way. For Elizabeth Debicki, who played Diana in seasons 5 and 6 of the Netflix series about the British royal family, the scenes leading up to the tragedy in a Paris tunnel were both easy and terrifying to film.
The terrible aspect was the responsibility. Diana was a real person, who died in a high-speed car crash while fleeing a horde of paparazzi. Debicki felt he owed it to viewers, many of whom remember Diana, to play the role with heart and perfect precision.
The ease came from already having played the character for an entire season. In season 6, the voice and gestures came naturally. Debicki, who grew up in Melbourne, Australia, used a coastal metaphor. “By then, he was already in the water,” he said. “I'm here now. Let's go swimming”.
Throughout season six, there are scenes of Diana and her new boyfriend, Dodi al-Fayed (Khalid Abdalla), running from the paparazzi. “You literally spend hours and hours in cars with people screaming and banging on the windows,” he recalled.
It felt exhausting, scary, and very real. When it came time to film Diana's last night, Debicki was responding more than acting, letting her body react to the bumps and roar of motorcycles driven by stuntmen speeding by, he said.
“A big part of doing this show is just giving up,” Debicki explained. “This part of the story was really bleak and difficult. I just thought, I have to go there.”
Debicki never formally auditioned to play Diana. After the first season of “The Crown,” she read for a guest acting role, which she did not get. But her representative told her that the series might want her later to play Diana.
However, Debicki did not trust it. She didn't see the physical resemblance and she has never played the role of a naive woman. Once Emma Corrin was announced as Diana in season 4, Debicki stepped down from the role entirely.
However, Peter Morgan, the creator of “The Crown,” had always intended for Debicki to play an older Diana.
“To me, she was always in a one-candidate group,” Morgan wrote in an email. “If she had turned us down, she would have had no choice but to write the show differently.”
Debicki then embarked on “this endless sea of research,” poring through boxes of documents, analyzing photographs, watching videos, and honing Diana's specific dialect and cadence—soft, aristocratic, often louder at the beginning of the sentence than at the end. final, she said.
The Diana he created is glamorous, wounded, playful and cunning.
As Debicki began filming the fifth season on location, people often approached her as if she were Diana, asking to speak to her and wanting the actress to hold their babies. But in the scenes with dialogue, which mostly had to do with her separation and divorce from Prince Charles (Dominic West), she experienced a feeling of isolation.
That made season six, at least at first, a relief. Having CCTV footage of Diana and Fayed the night they died, she and Abdalla agreed that they perceived a real intimacy.
Was it easy to fall in love with Debicki's Diana? “Definitely,” Abdalla responded. “We both wanted to find that tenderness and that sense of fun.”
Resolved to face the end, Debicki said she discovered “these really lovely moments where she's having a really good time and things are really easy and carefree and actually the future is very bright.”
Debicki is lucky to have never been harassed by paparazzi. “I'm not particularly interesting in that way,” she claimed. The scenes of photographers chasing Diana hit her hard.
Morgan chose not to show the accident or Diana's death in a hospital, a decision the actress agrees with. “I don't think it's necessary at all,” she said. “You must proceed with enormous respect and caution because this is a real person and a deep and terrible tragedy.”
Although most of his scenes ended a year ago, Debicki doesn't feel like he's rid himself of the character or that tragedy. He is still swimming in the water.
“Maybe I'm still a little emotionally trapped,” she declared. “I really don't think I'm gone, that's the honest answer.”
By: Alexis Soloski
The New York Times
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/7026259, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-12-12 19:50:06
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