Elizabeth Debicki is Fully Aware of the \201cImmense Responsibility\201d of Portraying Princess Diana on \201cThe Crown\201d

Ahead of Thursday’s premiere of part one of The Crown’s sixth and final season, Elizabeth Debicki—who plays Princess Diana on the Netflix series—fully embraces the responsibility she and the show have to portray Diana’s death accurately onscreen. Diana died at just 36 years old in a car accident in Paris, alongside companion Dodi Fayed and their driver, Henri Paul.

When asked by Entertainment Tonight how seriously the show approached her death, Debicki said it was “An immense, immense responsibility. It’s difficult to describe. It was something that we thought about, that we carried with us, that woke us up in the night.” Debicki, who also played Diana in season five of the show, added “We tried our very best to do [the story] properly.” 

To how she hopes fans react to the show’s ending, Debicki said she hopes they feel fulfilled: “My message is just—thank you for sticking with the show, thank you for watching it. I hope that we give you what you need from it,” she said.

When all was said and done, Debicki said she did end up feeling content with her performance, though the process to get there was far from easy for her as an actress. “It was a very difficult and also very beautiful thing to be asked to do as an actor,” she said. “So much as it was very harrowing, it was also—there was a sort of grace to it at the same time.”

To transform into character, The Crown’s hair and makeup designer Cate Hall said of Debicki “In terms of fittings, I would say she’s probably spent upwards of 30 hours in the hair and makeup chair while we do stuff,” Hall said. Hall added that Debicki dyed her eyebrows for the role and stuck to a strict schedule of spray tans, nail routines, and daily hair and makeup changes to portray Diana post-divorce in the mid-1990s.

“I don’t think you come anywhere near sort of learning as much as I learned about this character and not feel that the only thing worth doing in life is putting love into the world,” Debicki told People. She added, “I mean, I think I learned things about the degree to which she had an enormous and wicked sense of humor, the difficulties that she was facing, the way that she triumphed through them, the way she used her voice in a way that was sort of very progressive at the time. Yeah, I learned a lot.” 

After part one’s debut on November 16, part two will premiere on December 14—and that will (unfortunately) be that.