by Gill Pringle
In an award-winning series populated by the creme de la creme of British actors – Australia’s Elizabeth Debicki is one of only a handful of foreign-born actors invited to star in the series.
And not just any role – portraying one of Britain’s most beloved royal icons, the late Princess Diana.
As The Crown’s Season 5 debuts, audiences will see for themselves why Debicki, 32, was such perfect casting for the late princess, from those emotion-filled big blue eyes down to her graceful long-limbed elegance and perfect British accent.
If all of Season 5’s new cast admit to nerves, as their performances are compared to previous portrayals, then naturally, Debicki is perhaps the most anxious.
“Was I nervous? Yeah. Oh, definitely,” she laughs. “I think it would be fair to say we were all nervous. The show does feel like an enormous responsibility. But we are supported by this network of people who understand that pressure and want us to be able to do it the best we can. It’s an enormous challenge,” says Debicki who inherits the role of Diana from Emma Corrin who played her in the last two seasons.
“It’s an interesting process and I found it took me some time to understand that you’re bringing your interpretation to [showrunner] Peter Morgan’s interpretation of this person. But then the people watching the show come with such attachment and memory and a sense of ownership too over these characters in a way, not only from the people who’ve played them before, but also from their living memory and their history.
“So, you have to leave a kind of space for that, and it’s a dance between all those things. It’s a beautiful process, but it’s also very rewarding too, because we get to work with each other and get to do these wonderful things,” says the actress who plays opposite Dominic West’s Prince Charles and his real-life son Senan West, 13, making his TV debut as a shy Prince William.
“I love my kids on the show,” says the 6’3” actress.
“I remember the first time that we were all on set together, and I was doing a phone call scene with Senan and he was doing the lines and I was doing them off camera and I went around to the monitor to look for our director, and I saw Dom sitting there in front of the monitor with his cans on, and it was the first time he’d seen Senan on camera,” recalls Debicki who graduated from the Victorian College of Arts, going on to earn a Best Actress AACTA for her role in 2013’s The Great Gatsby.
“So yeah, I love my kids very much and we’ve been so incredibly fortunate with the casting of the boys who play all the kids in the show, but with William and Harry, they’re incredible children. They’re really new to it and very fresh. It’s a lot for them since it’s their first or the second job. But they’re so smart and generous and kind and I’m so much happier when they’re on set with me and as soon as they go I miss them so much. I always text our casting director and say thank you for finding these amazing kids because they really make it such an important part of the story.”
West is clearly delighted to share The Crown with his son. “It was very moving actually. He’s never acted before because COVID stopped any school plays or anything, so I’ve never seen him act and he has this amazing innocence to him that was extraordinary to watch – as well as the fact that obviously he’s my boy,” West says proudly.
That being said, he also found working with his son to be an almost meta experience.
“It’s very difficult when you act with children to have a physical intimacy, obviously. And with Senan that was obviously not a question, which made it much easier. But then I found when it was more emotional or when it was more of a difficult scene, it made it much more difficult and you were slightly split in your head between ‘Okay, we’re acting this part but that’s a bit weird, isn’t it? I’m talking about your mum but not your real mum,’ and so I found that quite difficult but generally, it was really moving, and I think he enjoyed it. It didn’t look like he was but actually he was loving it,” he laughs.
With West taking over from Josh O’Connor who portrayed Prince Charles in the last season, we meet a new frustrated Charles who is impatient to have a real job, pushing his agenda with Prime Minister John Major, portrayed magnificently by Jonny Lee Miller.
Locked in an unhappy marriage to Diana, Charles takes comfort with his married mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles, now portrayed by Olivia Williams.
West, actually a personal friend of King Charles III, is unsure whether or not audiences will feel more sympathy for Charles’ plight after watching Season 5.
“I don’t know. I mean, his is one of the most scrutinised, publicised lives in the world. It’s hard to know what people know about him. And this period covers a time when he got not only bad press, but maybe because it was a divorce and there’s always two sides of the divorce – that I suppose viewers saw or heard one or the other,” he muses.
“Hopefully there’s a bit of perspective now and I hope everyone gets a fair hearing. I think that’s part of the reason for doing it. I obviously love the guy and you have to start falling in love with a character and inevitably you take their side, or you give them the benefit of the doubt and I hope that will maybe happen when people see Charles in this.”
With Imelda Staunton succeeding Olivia Colman as the Queen, while Lesley Manville takes over from Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret, Jonathan Pryce portrays Prince Philip, The Crown’s final Duke of Edinburgh.
The cast were busy filming Season 6 of The Crown when Britain’s longest reigning monarch died in September, taking a day of absence in respect.
Staunton hopes to do justice to a woman who put public service above everything. “The people who queued and queued and queued [at her funeral], I think they felt such huge respect for someone who kept her promise. She just kept her promise,” says the actress.
Pryce is likewise impressed by the late monarch’s dedication to duty, “I think it’s also a reflection of where our society is at the moment, with a lack of trust and a lack of believability in our politicians.
“The same that happened with Diana’s death. The public said, ‘You’re not going to do it. We’re going to do it,’ and they came out in huge numbers. I think, for me, seeing the crowds queuing for the queen, they were saying: this is the kind of person we want to be following and leading our country.”
Staunton will argue that she and Pryce got more drama than any of the previous occupants of their roles. “In a way, I feel sort of lucky that we are looking at their lives when it was very difficult. As an actor, you’ve got more stuff to do and it’s therefore extremely satisfying. And it’s dramatic. And this is a drama. And Peter writes great drama, and he bases it around events and real people, but he gives them heart, soul, brains, all that stuff. It’s not dramatic being nice and being easy. It’s dramatic when things start to go wrong, and how those people deal with those difficulties. And we get to do that journey,” says the actress who explores The Queen’s legendary “Annus horribilis”, made all the worse by the growing bond between Natasha McElhone’s Penny Knatchbull and Prince Philip.
In preparation for her portrayal of Diana, Debicki did a “deep dive” into The Crown’s royal archive.
“It’s all these little archive snippets of footage that never made it to the news. There’s no voice over and no agenda to it. It’s just raw footage and for me as the actor looking at how to access the character, it’s always those sort of little off moments, like how somebody opens the car door; why they’re doing something with their body; the interaction; the sort of physical language, that is fascinating for me,” says Debicki who worked with dialect and movement coaches to perfect her performance.
“We had the time to do that work properly, which I found to be really rewarding and juicy,” says the actress who also starred in Widows, Tenet and as Ayesha in Guardians of the Galaxy.
She relished working with The Crown’s award-winning costume designer Amy Roberts in portraying a woman who was seen as one of Britain’s most famous fashion horses.
“It is a really deep and fundamentally psychological conversation you have about accessing these people in the way that the writing does; who they are behind a closed door and finding that silhouette, and how she brought the private into the public sphere which was such a non-royal thing to do and so fascinating for people because it was very transgressive, and also an attempt to capture her own narrative, really through just silhouette and choices.
“And so, we had that part of the story to tell, which was really satisfying to do but we also got to imagine who Diana is behind closed doors and so much of that is finding a raw version of somebody, and allowing the audience to access that private sphere,” she says.
The Crown: Seasons 1 – 5 are now streaming on Netflix
