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Over the years, many have played the part of Princess Diana at various stages of her life. But in Netflix’s The Crown, Elizabeth Debicki easily takes the prize of most uncanny portrayal. From her signature head tilt to her piercing stare, the Australian actress became the spitting image of the late royal during her final years. But immersing yourself in such a role doesn’t come without its takeaways.
In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Debicki reflected on her time as the ‘People’s Princess’ for the show’s fifth and sixth season, sharing how she’s come to feel about the royal, and what she’s learned from her.
“I think Princess Diana, in the way that I’ve tried to play her, is someone who tries to make people at ease,” Debicki told the outlet. “My Diana is someone who’s not been listened to very well or given a lot of space to be seen in a certain light.”
She then opened up about the depiction of the romance between the princess and her partner, Dodi Fayed, who also lost his life in the fatal 1997 car crash that killed Diana.
“The way that Khalid [Abdalla] played Dodi informed a lot of what I found out in the relationship—that he’s very gentle, he’s very loving, he listens in an incredible way,” she said. “[There’s] this sense of, ‘Oh, isn’t this an unexpectedly easy relationship that we’ve fallen into?’ And then there’s this trajectory in the story where the media coverage of the relationship taints it, spins it in a certain way, and all of that lightness and air in the relationship becomes much more pressurised.”
But it was Diana’s relationship with her children, Prince William and Prince Harry, that really touched and surprised the actress.
“I think one of the most important things… is the relationships she has with her children,” she explained.
“All I ever had as an actor was the outline, the silhouette, the public-facing narrative,” she explained. “There are lots of snaps that you see where [she] just looks full of joy and like a mother really attempting to make sure her teenage boys have a really good time on holidays, and that’s really what I leaned into trying to put onscreen.”
Despite channelling Diana, including recreating memorable scenes like that diving board photo, Debicki admits that it’s impossible to ever really know what she was going through.
“One of the things about doing The Crown is you do not have the answers,” she said. “You’re not an authority; you are putting the pieces together like other people are. I have access to a lot of archival stuff, but that doesn’t mean I have the answers,” she said, recalling the moment she tried to portray the iconic scene. “So, for instance, in that diving board photo, I too wondered before making choices as an actor: ‘What was going on? Did she know she was being photographed, and was she doing it on purpose?’ There seems to be a real melancholy to those photos, but it’s also a very independent moment in her life.”
But through learning about Princess Diana’s later years, Debicki took on some valuable lessons that will stay with her.
“Life is short, and all we have are the people around us, and we should endeavour to be as kind and generous to everybody,” she said. “I also think [Diana] put love at the centre of her life for her children, and I think she believed that pursuing the love she felt, she was worthy of receiving, was also a worthy pursuit to put at the centre of her life, and I’ve learned from that too.”
