Elizabeth Debicki is Fully Aware of the “Immense Responsibility” of Portraying Princess Diana on “The Crown”

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 13 November 2023

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.”

Elizabeth Debicki attends the Dior Womenswear Spring/Summer 2022 show as part of Paris Fashion Week

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.

Rachel Burchfield is a writer, editor, and podcaster whose primary interests are fashion and beauty, society and culture, and, most especially, the British Royal Family and other royal families around the world. She serves as Marie Claire’s Senior Celebrity and Royals Editor and has also contributed to publications like Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, People, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and W, among others. Before taking on her current role with Marie Claire, Rachel served as its Weekend Editor and later Royals Editor. She is the cohost of Podcast Royal, a show that was named a top five royal podcast by The New York Times. A voracious reader and lover of books, Rachel also hosts I’d Rather Be Reading, which spotlights the best current nonfiction books hitting the market and interviews the authors of them. Rachel frequently appears as a media commentator, and she or her work has appeared on outlets like NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN, and more.

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