Elizabeth Debicki Doesn't Feel the Pressure Around Portraying Diana
Portraying the people's princess on screen is no easy feat, yet it's been attempted time and time again.
25 years after her untimely death, Princess Diana is still as famous as ever thanks to countless Hollywood retellings of her story. But when it comes to peeling back the layers of her life — her doomed marriage to Prince Charles, her alleged incompatibility with the royal family, and of course her undeniable global popularity — no project has attempted to showcased her inner workings quite like Netflix's The Crown.
For the show's fifth season, which premiered last week, Elizabeth Debicki takes over the role from Emma Corrin to play Diana at her most emotionally raw. She's heading towards a divorce from Prince Charles, working to shield her two young sons Prince William and Prince Harry from the tabloid frenzy following her every move, and aiming to figure out who she is apart from the royal institution she'll never be able to shake. She also tip-toes into finding love again: the new season explores her real-life romances with Hasnat Ahmad Khan and Dodi Fayed. Following the recent passing of Queen Elizabeth II — who, lest we forget, is the actual star of the show — more eyes are on the drama series than ever as it becomes less a form of entertainment and more a fictionalized artifact of how the British monarchy lost its way.
So many of Diana's characteristics and quirks feel essential for any actor playing her — her piercing stare, her whisper of a voice, even the posture of her hands when she's visibly nervous. But Debicki says she didn't feel pressure to emulate or respond to anything that's been done before. Instead, she wanted to find an inherent connection with the princess, both as a person and as a character written by show creator Peter Morgan.
"It was more important for me to do something that felt authentic to the kind of essence I saw in her—and that also felt true to Peter's writing of her in that very specific period of her life," Debicki tells BAZAAR.com. "There's been so many amazing portrayals of her, and in recent times, too, but I didn't really think too much about them. Maybe it's because I'm a theater baby really, and it's so normal for me that multiple people attempt to play the same character. It almost felt like it was part of the cannon and I was just going to do my interpretation of it."
Having confidence in her approach, however, doesn't mean the filming came without difficulties. Debicki was acutely aware that she'd be playing Diana at one of the most emotionally daunting eras of her life — a mere year before she died tragically at the age of 26 with her rumored fiancé Fayed at her side in Paris.
"It's a big journey in season five, and it sort of hits different levels of bottom. As an actor, when you come to work and you know that it's your job to play a scene that your character's really suffering through, the challenge is doing it the best you can and being as honest as you can," she explains. "Certainly the scenes of [Diana and Charles] getting divorced were really sad and really heavy. But then obviously, the flip side is that as an actor, that's the kind of material you love to do."
Playing Diana means showing not only what happened in her life, but also gesturing at what could have been — a question that the public and media have continued to ponder in the decades after her death. One could argue we're experiencing a bout of Princess Diana fatigue, given how much material there is readily available to read and stream and watch about the late royal. With projects such as Spencer and recent documentaries like HBO's The Princess, one wonders what much else can be said about her life at this point. For Debicki, though, it's not about creating a definitive portrait of the princess (though fans of the series see an Emmy nomination in her future), but rather offering a reminder of what her life ultimately represented.
"[Diana's eternal allure was] a combination of things. If you are that observed and if you are the fodder for the newspapers to sell, there's always gonna be an an element of having to perform a role while in public. That's your duty when you are part of that family as well — to uphold something that's both human and symbolic," says Debicki. "But I also think the reason that she moved so many people in her lifetime and touched so many people's lives is that she was incredibly honest — and that was very provocative. She let people in so, so much, and she was very brave to do that."
Debicki is currently filming The Crown's sixth (and presumably final) season and reflecting on what she'll take from her time walking in the shoes of one of the world's most famous women.
"My love and appreciation for her — which so many people have — is deeper than ever. Now I understand how difficult the odds were at times and how she really triumphed through a lot of things," she says. "She was incredibly kind and generous, and she had the capacity to love people very deeply and understand that that's what people really need. People need to be loved. And that's an incredibly rare commodity and she gave it in spades her whole life. That's an amazing thing to learn from, really."
You Might Also Like
