Into the Light: How Playing Princess Diana Changed Elizabeth Debicki’s Approach to Acting

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—presumably, 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?” Debicki says. “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 role terrified her at first, understandably. Twenty-seven years after her death, Diana remains a beloved figure, prominent in the minds of people who never knew her personally and those who did, no one more so than her sons Prince William and Prince Harry. “It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but it did feel a little bit impossible for a while,” says Debicki, who broke through in 2013 for her supporting turn as Jordan Baker in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and has since worked with Steve McQueen (Widows) and Christopher Nolan (Tenet). “She’s one of the most famous people that ever lived and she’s still so important to so many people. 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.”

Whatever spark of royal magnetism Morgan sensed in Debicki proved perspicacious. Picking up from Emma Corrin (who played twentysomething Diana in Season 4), Debicki debuted her interpretation of the princess in Season 5, which dramatizes the breakdown of her marriage to Prince Charles in the early 1990s, and was showered with praise for how uncannily she captured her. The soft voice and aristocratic diction, the 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.

 Having made her way through Season 5 “discovering everything as I went along,” Debicki approached the sixth and final season, which premiered last fall and produced even more raves for the actress, with more confidence and a sense of “sitting comfortably,” she says. “I had the feeling going into Season 6, as if I’d sort of gotten away with it and that I got to try it again. I felt finally like I trusted myself—really, completely—with the part. It took me a long time to feel that.”

Returning to set, Debicki knew, she says, “what I needed to give the audience, and that felt kind of meta. 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. So it was extremely important in Season 6 that I kept finding places for those things to exist, just these snatches of joy and playfulness and that golden, luminous light that seemed to always come off her.” 

Which is not to say that Season 6 was easy. The first three episodes chronicle Diana’s final days before she died in August 1997 in a car crash in Paris while trying to escape the paparazzi. We follow Diana and her sons (played by Rufus Kampa and Fflyn Edwards) as they vacation in the south of France on Dodi Fayed’s billionaire father’s yacht, spraying each other with water guns as they jump into the Mediterranean and giggling as they watch Jumanji. A romance blossoms between Diana and Dodi (Khalid Abdalla). These moments are soaked in a gorgeous, sun-drenched ease that is overshadowed by what we all know is coming as the princess and her new companion make one decision after another that leads them to their tragic end in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel.

Pushing aside the weight of that dread was Debicki’s greatest challenge. “As an actor, playing the scenes, I was just playing very, very real time, moment to moment,” she says. “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 has 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. “We had to lift ourselves above the impending story beat and give them a blissful lack of awareness,” Debicki says. “That was really difficult because you can’t totally shut out your knowledge of the thing.” 

She can’t imagine navigating those moments without her “beautiful and steady scene partner,” Abdalla (The Kite Runner, The Square). “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.”

From the first question to the last, Debicki gives 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. 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?” she says. “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.”

Letting Princess Diana go after living with her for three years has been an equally complicated process. Now, as she sits on the verge of earning a second Emmy nomination (in addition to the SAG Award she won in February), Debicki has her mind set on returning to the stage for the first time since she starred with Hope Davis and Mark Strong in David Hare’s The Red Barn in London in 2016. She understands the impact The Crown has had on her. “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 says. “Because I did something that scared me so much, that’s probably made me braver. And I’m really grateful for that.”

MISSY SWARTZ

is Deputy Editor of Awards at
TheWrap, where she covers all things awards. In this issue of TheWrapBook, Schwartz profiled Elizabeth Debicki and collaborated with Philiana Ng to explore the actors and actresses in our “Faces of TV” portfolio.