Kristen Stewart is gearing up to play Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín’s upcoming biopic “Spencer,” due to shoot early next year, and to prepare for the role she’s turned to another Di-heavy source of material for assistance: Netflix’s “The Crown.”
“I feel really lucky to have ‘The Crown’ because I’ve emotionally invested in people that to me feel — like, I know that they’re real people, and there’s ample material to reinforce that and sort of remind yourself of that — but now I feel this emotional attachment to these characters and I have this accompaniment that I can go to sleep with and feel like, ‘Oh, God, I already I already have feelings about these people,’” Stewart told TheWrap. “That speaks to the show’s credit.”
But while she’s a fan of the show, she’s also happy that it doesn’t overlap tonally or time-wise with her upcoming film.
“Spencer” will look at Princess Diana over the course of one of her final Christmas holidays with the House of Windsor in their legendary Sandringham estate. Steven Knight wrote the screenplay. The fourth season of Netflix’s “The Crown” introduces us to a young Diana Spencer, before she was the princess we all knew and loved, through her courtship with Prince Charles and the early years of their tumultuous marriage. “The Crown’s” depiction of Diana (played by Emma Corrin) also focuses heavily on her struggle with bulimia nervosa.
Season 4 of “The Crown” ends in 1990, while “Spencer” takes place in the early 1990s.
“Luckily, there’s no overlap time-wise, and also historically, and tonally, they’re very different, so I’m really cool with it,” she said. “There’s this idea that it could be horrible that we had like two of the same things at the same time. But they do feel so different.”
Stewart is getting ready to head to London for a late January production start, and is aware that the ever-changing landscape due to the coronavirus might impact production. However, she says she’s impatient to get started.
“Luckily, it’s such a contained movie that our quarantine is going to be really particular and we’re going to have a tiny little bubble,” she said. “I really hope that nothing gets in our way and messes that up because I’m very much raring to go on, like not in a bad way at all, but I’m like, ‘oh, man, I can’t wait another month!’ I really want to just eat that and have it off the plate. I’d really like that to be behind me, even though I can’t wait to see how it goes!”
Watch the video above.